Paradise Australia

Henry Bastin began painting in the 1950s while working on a Queensland sheep grazing property owned by art collector and patron Major Harold de Vahl Rubin. Bastin’s naïve paintings were made in the manner of French painter Henri Rousseau. His early works include landscapes of Queensland’s tropical beaches as well as the inland plains and mountains of Central Australia. 

Exhibitions of Bastin’s work in the late 1950s established him as a pioneer of naïve painting in Australia. He used gouache in the 1960s but later discovered enamel house paints, which best captured the unique landscapes of Australia. Bastin became known for his interpretations of the Australian landscape featuring native birds. One of his paintings was woven into a large tapestry at the Victorian Tapestry Workshop and exhibited throughout Australia.

Paradise Australia was the last large work painted by Bastin before his death in 1979.