(b Saal, nr Stralsund, Sweden [now Germany], 15 Jan 1746; d Berne, 2 April 1807). Swiss watercolourist, draughtsman, engraver and illustrator. He received his first drawing lessons in Stralsund from Philipp Hackert in 1762. In 1765 he moved to Paris and became a pupil of Joseph-Marie Vien and Noël Hallé. In Paris Dunker met a number of artists in the circle around the engraver Jean Georges Wille, including Pierre-François Basan, Jacques Gabriel Huquier, Adrian Zingg and Sigmund Freudenberger. At this period he worked as a draughtsman and watercolourist, principally of landscapes. He worked with the engravers and publishers Huquier and Basan, collaborating with other artists on an album of engravings from the collection of Etienne-François, Duc de Choiseul, Recueil d’estampes gravées d’après les tableaux du cabinet de Monseigneur le duc de Choiseul (Paris, 1771). In 1772 Dunker was working in Basle and in 1773 in Berne. He produced book illustrations for the Heptaméron français (Berne, 1778) as well as vignettes, genre scenes and landscapes, such as View of Fribourg (Berne, Kstmus.). He worked on the engravings for Caspar Wolf’s Alpine views Merkwürdige Prospekte aus den Schweizer-Gebürgen (Berne, 1789) and wrote three small volumes of Schriften, containing poems, farces and prose pieces, which were published anonymously between 1782 and 1785. His large family and the worsening political situation in Switzerland brought him into financial difficulty, but from 1798 to 1800 he produced humorous picture sequences and political caricatures, in which he made fun of the representatives of the new order in Switzerland, for example in Das Jahr MDCCC in Bildern und Versen (Berne, 1800). His son Philip Heinrich Dunker (b c. 1780; d 3 May 1836) also became a painter and engraver.

• Dunker, Balthazar Anton
  • Berne, §2: Art life and organization
  • König, Franz Niklaus
  • Wille: (1) Jean-Georges Wille