Peter Bousfield | Australian Artist | Odana Bloomfield
Peter Bousfield was an Australian artist who studied with M. J. MacNally and Will Ashton. He was a member of the Australian Watercolour Institute and the Royal Art Society of NSW. He is represented at the Ballarat Regional Art Gallery. He is referenced on p.289 in Jean Campbell's Australian Watercolour Painters: 1780 to the Present Day published by Craftsman House, Sydney in 1989.
Our collection of delightful, small watercolours and pencil drawings are from Bousfield's sketchbooks during his travels around the world. Bousfield travelled extensively painting charming, intimate watercolours of his travels in Australian, New Zealand, England, Europe, Africa, the United States, Canada, Japan, Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka as well as many other countries. Dating from 1906 to 1938, these small watercolours and pencil drawings are historically and artistically interesting. In 2014, a publisher from Sri Lanka purchased all the works of this country (eleven in total) to include in a forthcoming book on Sri Lanka from a non-Sri Lankan artist's viewpoint.
In The Story of Australian Art, author William Moore refers to Peter Bousfield's watercolours as freshly painted landscapes suffused with bright colour and in a review of his exhibition at Rubery Bennett's art gallery in Sydney for The Sydney Mail in November 1929, Beatrice Tildesley writes:
This artist, now exhibiting at Bennett's Australia Fine Art Gallery, has set some of his watercolour sketches in too high a key, and has also a tendency to over-emphasise and crowd in detail. But there is decision and definition about most of his work, and some good drawing is to be noted. He has also, in several examples, a very happy effect of distance. The best of the collection is Near Robertson, which has a beautiful sky and warm earth tones; but The Top of the Ridge is a well-handled study of trees, and Southern France
1907 - Japan
1908 - Myanmar (Burma)
1909 - France, Germany, Switzerland
1910, 1911, 1912 - Germany
1913 - Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland
1915 - Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, USA
1918 - American Samoa, Hawaii, USA
1919 - South Africa
1927 - Africa, England, Ceylon (Sir Lanka), France, Italy, Laccadive Islands (Lakshadweep), South Africa, USA
1928 - Australia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka)
1929 - Ceylon (Sri Lanka)
1937 - Australia, New Zealand
1938
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
November 1929 - Rubery Bennett Art Gallery, Sydney - Watercolours by Peter Bousfield
August 1931 - Fine Art Society's Gallery, Sydney - Exhibition of Watercolours by Peter Bousfield
August 1932 - The Royal Art Society of NSW, Sydney
April 1933 - Education Department Art Gallery, Sydney - Australian Watercolour Institute's 10th Annual Exhibition
April 1937 -
August 1944 - Education Department Art Gallery, Sydney - Australian Watercolour Institute's 21st Annual Exhibition
October 1944 - Men's Auxiliary of the Kindergarten Union of NSW