Part of the The Richmond School of Indiana painters and Richmond's premier artist, John Bundy was born in Guilford County, North Carolina and was raised on a farm in Morgan County, Indiana near Monrovia. He attended Quaker schools and married Mary Marlatt in 1875.

He spent nearly a decade in New York City as a portraitist and was also a photographer, but he decided to focus on landscape painting. He worked in both oil and watercolor, and much of his subject matter came from Wayne County, Indiana, especially the Whitewater Valley.

In 1888, he moved to Richmond and for eight years headed the Art Department at Earlham College where he taught drawing and painting. During that time, a book of his etchings, Fon...