Portrait of Ruth McCreary, 1954

Collection of the artist Estate of the artist Private Collection, Ontario

Jack Bush painted for three decades in a figurative manner that gradually evolved into abstraction, articulated in his large and brightly coloured non-representational canvases of the 1950s to 1970s. In the late 1920s his interest in fine art grew through contact with members of the Group of Seven, the Ontario Society of Artists and the Canadian Group of Painters. Throughout the 1930s Bush worked as a commercial artist while taking night classes at the Ontario College of Art, developing a significant body of figurative work prior to his arrival at abstraction in the late 1950s. “Portrait of Ruth McCreary” was created as an advertisement for Canadian Home Journal Magazine in 1954. The elegant female sitter for this emotionally expressive portrait was in fact a neighbour of Bush, depicted in a moment of contemplation at home.