Bushnell stayed two years in France, before going to Italy where he spent some time in Rome, and then in Venice, where he made a monument depicting the Siege of Candia and a naval battle for a Procutare di San Marco.
He had intended to make a complete set of kings for the exchange "but hearing that another person... had made interest to carve some of them, Bushnell would not proceed, though he had begun six or seven".
[3] Anecdotes concerning his haughty disposition and increasing eccentricity were repeated in artistic circles and recorded in the eighteenth century by George Vertue in his notebooks.
[3] Following his death in 1701, his widow Mary and his sons continued to live in his half-finished house near Hyde Park, London, keeping at bay the strangers who were curious to see Bushnel's remaining sculptures, and by degrees destroying them.
In the mid-nineteenth century Bushnell's reputation stood high enough for an imaginary portrait representing him to be included amongst the world's great sculptors in the Frieze of Parnassus on the Albert Memorial, in Kensington Gardens in London.