Harry Bush:
Snowfall in the Suburbs - A View from the Artist's House
Framed (ref: 10480)

Oil on canvas

Signed with monogram and dated 1940 lower left 

Tags: Harry Bush oil flowers Garden houses landscape trees 1.PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST Garden Museum

Provenance: Provenance: Christie's, 28 September 1984, lot 71

Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.64

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1940, no 250

Bush and the artist Noel Laura Nisbet (1887–1956), whom he married in 1910,  live in the same semi-detached house in Queensland Avenue, Merton Park, SW19, (a gift from Noel’s father) from 1914 until their deaths, but while Noel’s work featured imagined scenes (often for book illustrations), over the years Harry regularly depicted the suburban back gardens seen from his studio. Both artist's had a custom-built studio on in an extra storey for his studio.  Bush saw the ancestry of his art in the quiet dignity of Dutch and Flemish domestic scenes, and, as his younger daughter recalled, mixed pigments and oils, 'so that his work should mellow, glow and last, and if possible, improve' (The Art of the Garden, Tate, 2004, p. 85)

Bush's paintings so obviously mirror the ordinary world we see around us in the U.K (the houses are very specific to England – even London suburbia). His gift is to take that ‘reality’ beyond the immediate to something still and satisfying, yet still rooted in and expressed through, the everyday.

We are grateful to Peter Quartermaine for his assistance.

Exhibited: Sanctuary, Artist-Gardeners, 1919-39, Garden Museum, London, 25th February – 5 April, 2020

Literature: Christopher Woodward, Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners, 1919–1939, published by Liss Llewellyn, 2020