SOLD


Harry Bush:
High Noon, 1956
Framed (ref: 10561)

Oil on canvas

26 2/5 x 3/5 in. (67 x 93 cm)

Tags: Harry Bush oil landscape

Provenance: The Artist's Studio

Harry 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. 

The exact location of this painting has yet to be identified but it appears to be set on on an extensive town-edge common. Hay ricks are being made off to the right distance, -  commons or parts thereof were sometimes let for hay.  The buildings are predominantly modest single houses. There are very few rows/terraces or big houses, no industry, and only what looks like a possible nonconformist church. Paul Stamper has suggested that for this composition Bush might  have gone back to Sussex –  he was born in Brighton – and this shows a town at the foot of the Downs.

High Noon is a 1952 American Western film produced by Stanley Kramer from a screenplay by Carl Foreman, directed by Fred Zinnemann, and starring Gary Cooper. The plot, which occurs in real time, centers on a town marshal whose sense of duty is tested when he must decide to either face a gang of killers alone, or leave town with his new wife.

An iconic film whose story has been partly or completely repeated in later film productions, its ending scenes (a final showdown with Cooper pitched against four outlaws) especially inspired a next-to-endless number of later films, including but not just limited to westerns.

We are grateful to Paul Stamper FSA and  Peter Quartermaine for assistance.