Charles Bush, Pastorale, 1947, Regent Theatre
Summary
Born in East Brunswick , Melbourne, Charles Bush (1919–89) acquired his first formal art training as a 14-year-old at the National Gallery Art School, to which he returned to teach in the early 1950s. Following military service in World War II, during which he was a war artist in New Guinea and Timor, he studied under Bernard Meninsky in London, thanks to a British Council grant in 1949. A consummate artist with both pen and brush, and particularly admired for his watercolours, Bush favoured cityscapes, landscapes and figures as his subjects.
The Art and Heritage Collection holds three large oil-on-canvas paintings by Bush. The verso inscriptions on two of these, ‘Pastorale’ and [Untitled], indicate they were executed for Hoyts’ Regent Theatre in 1947. Parts of the cinema had been devastated by fire two years earlier, and the rebuilt picture palace opened in December 1947. Although the landscapes in Bush’s two paintings differ in setting, the paintings read as a pair, with a common mood and palette, and picturesque ruins dominating both the pictorial space and the tiny figures in the foreground. These aspects give a romantic sense of natural universality and timelessness to the works, which one might argue are perfect for a ‘palace of dreams’, erasing the not only the memories of the devasting blaze but also a calamitous war that was only just over.
