Harry Bush lived and worked in a semi-detached house on Queensland Avenue, Merton Park, SW19, from 1914 until his death, alongside his wife, the artist Noel Laura Nisbet (1887–1956).

Each had a custom-built studio added in an extra storey of the house. From this vantage point, Bush painted his immediate surroundings, returning again and again to the same suburban views as they shifted with light, weather, and season.

His work captures the subtle passing of time and celebrates the rhythmic cycle of the year, finding meaning in the quiet continuity of domestic life. Painted during the Second World War, Snowfall in the Suburbs – A View from the Artist’s House (1940) transforms a familiar suburban scene through frost and silence, offering a moment of contemplation amid wartime uncertainty. In Spring Landscape, Merton – A View from the Artist’s House (1949), tender shoots and soft light signal renewal and the gentle return of life to the garden. Summer Morning – View from the Artist’s House (1953) unfolds the warmth and stillness of high summer, its luminous scene suffused with calm. Late summer is represented by High Noon (1956), where hayricks are being made in the distance at the foot of the Downs. As the year turns toward colder months, The Shower (mid-1920s) adopts a more introspective tone, its subdued palette and domestic focus echoing winter’s inward mood.

Bush exhibited his major works at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, averaging one painting a year from 1922 until 1954. He traced the ancestry of his art to the restrained dignity of Dutch and Flemish interior and garden scenes and, as his younger daughter recalled, he mixed pigments and oils with care so that his paintings would “mellow, glow and last, and if possible, improve” (The Art of the Garden, Tate, 2004, p. 85).

Rooted in the ordinary world of English suburbia—houses unmistakably specific to London—Bush’s paintings carry everyday reality beyond the immediate. Through attentive observation, the familiar becomes hushed and sustaining. Across his work, the passage of the seasons unfolds as a quiet meditation on time, place, and daily life.