Australian beach pattern

Meere was one of a group of Sydney artists whose work modernised classical artistic traditions as a means of imaging national life during the inter-war period. The epitome of his vision by the late 1930s is 'Australian beach pattern'; a tableau of beach dwellers whose athletic perfections take on monumental heroic proportions. Meere created a crowded and complex composition through a pattern of bodies which appear as a still life of suspended strength. Perennially popular, the painting has contributed more than any other in Australian art towards the myth of the healthy young nation as told through the metaphor of the tanned god-like body of the sunbather.