Additional Images

Provenance:

Estate of the artist;
Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:

Richard Hersey, “Watercolors, Etchings Shown at Gallery,” The Standard (Montreal, QC) (11 Feb 1950).

Exhibited:

New Paintings by Jack Bush, Gavin Henderson Gallery, Toronto, ON, 17-29 Oct 1949.
Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour Special Exhibition, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, QC, 9 Feb-5 Mar 1950. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON, 15 Mar-12 Apr 1950, cat. no. 10.
Jack Bush: Watercolors, Theo Waddington Gallery, Montreal, QC, 1980.

Note:

The Beseechers is of the moment when Bush broke out of painting the southern Ontario scene in the manner of the Canadian Group of Painters. His paintings facilitated, and were essential to, the development of his abstract language that would define Canadian art in the next decade.

More than 35 years later, Christine Boyanoski addressed this episode in her groundbreaking exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Jack Bush: Early Work. In it she described Bush’s work in 1948 and 1949 as part of a period of his most penetrating experimentation. (1) When Pearl McCarthy reviewed Bush’s October 1949 exhibition at Gavin Henderson Gallery in The Globe and Mail on 15 October 1949, she commended it as his first exhibition in Toronto in two years following an episode of “intensive, personal work,” that contained works, “on a higher level than any of his former work.” (2)

(1) Christine Boyanoski, Jack Bush: Early Work (exh. cat.) (Toronto, ON: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1985) 21.

(2) Pearl McCarthy, “Pictures by Jack Bush Typify Deeper Trends,” (Toronto, ON) (15 Oct 1949): 9.

The Beeseechers, 1948 © Estate of Jack Bush (Copyright Visual Arts-CARCC, 2023)