Masters Gallery: Fine Canadian Art

FINE CANADIAN ART O C T 2 6 - N OV 1 2 0 2 0

THE FOUR SEASONS TORONTO W W W. M A S T E R S G A L L E R Y L T D . C O M

FINE CANADIAN ART

FINE CANADIAN ART

M A S T E R S G A L L E R Y L T D.

CONTENTS 4

Canadian Impressionism

14

Group of Seven & Tom Thomson

69

Group Contemporaries

84

Post-war & Contemporar y

121 Inter national

Post-war

C OV E R I M A G E : T O M T H O M S O N , B I R C H G R OV E , A L G O N Q U I N PA R K , 1 9 1 5

CANADIAN IMPRESSIONISM

Frank Armington (1876-1941) MSA La Petite Poupée, 1920 signed lower left titled and signed to verso oil on canvas 35x27.25 in. (88.9x69.2 cm.)

Provenance Loch Gallery, Calgary; Private collection

Born in Fordwich, Ontario, in 1876, Frank Armington, like so many early Canadian artists, left Canada in 1899 to move to Paris to continue his art studies. French culture, influences, and art buying citizens would prove critical to Armington’s career, which was divided between Canada and France, twice interrupted by war. He had met Brampton-born Caroline Wilkinson in J.L Forster’s art class in Toronto. She would follow him to Paris where they were married in 1900, returning to Canada shortly afterward. They would work together as painters, etchers, and engravers, enjoying critical and financial success, until Caroline’s death.

In France in 1905, Frank Armington studied with a number of prominent French artists, and was also able to work with Benjamin Constant at the Academie Julian. He had a work accepted at the Salon d’Automne in Paris that year, an exceptional accomplishment as a non-resident. He and Caroline had returned to Canada after the outbreak of WWI, and at its end, were eager to revisit Paris. The 1920s saw him interested in the ballet, and he painted a portrait of the noted Belgian ballerina YettaRianza entitled La Danseuse ~ Yetta-Rianza. This work was shown in the exhibition Paris moderne, and was purchased for the Musée Nationale du Luxembourg from this show. This success buoyed his interest in the subject and he created a number of fine paintings of ballerinas practicing, resting, or posed for their portrait.

La Petite Poupée, or The Little Doll, shows us a ballerina in a graceful pose, feet in the third position, arranging a small doll – one that is also a ballerina – on a dresser. We see the ballerina’s reflected face in the mirror, and the reflected back of the doll, whose legs she is posing. It is a skillfully arranged vignette, they are in opposite positions to one another, as well as reflected opposite positions to one another in the mirror. Over the ballerina’s left shoulder, we see a painting of a dancer, an additional reinforcement of the theme. A curtain at the left adds a final touch, creating a fully dancethemed setting for this sensitively handled work.

Frank Milton Armington (1876-1941) MSA

Pont Royal, Paris (Le Soir), 1922 signed and dated lower left “Frank M. Armington, 1922” titled and signed to verso oil on canvas 29x36.5 in. (73.6x92.7 cm) Provenance Collection of the Artist; Collection of Ms. M. B. Warren, a former classmate of the artist, in trade; Private collection, California; Private collection, North Carolina; Leland Little Auctions, Fine and Decorative Arts, Dec. 5, 2015, lot. 319; Private collection Exhibited Palace of Arts, The British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, London, 1924, cat. no. FF.110 Notes Related etching, 1923, in the collection of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

This exceptional Impressionist work by Frank Armington has a stellar note in its exhibition history. It was shown at The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley – known colloquially as Wembley – in 1924. A classic example of Armington’s second French period, he and his wife Caroline had left Canada and returned to Paris (this would be their second trip) at the end of the First World War. The would remained based there, although they travelled frequently, until the Second World War forced them back to Canada again.

Pont Royal, Paris (Le Soir), it is a beautifully handled scene. We have Pont Royal at night, captured in delicate blue-green brushwork, with alternating lights illuminating the traffic that crosses the bridge.

It seems as if it is raining, the light and air in the work have a quality of wetness to them, especially the reflected light as if bounces on the waters of the Seine below. Pont Royal is an arched bridge, built in 1685 over a four year period. It is one of the oldest bridges in Paris, and is located in the heart of the city. It connects to the Musée du Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the jardins des Tuileries, with the Jeu de Paume and the Musée de l’Orangerie at the end of the gardens.

Armington’s treatment is delicate, with the soft rose and canary yellow lights alternating as we move across the bridge. They shine downward from their beautiful cast iron standards, illuminating the activity on the bridge itself, and then reflecting off the river below. The lights from the street in the distance that we see under and through Pont Royal’s arches line what is now Quai François Mitterand.

These lights reflect in stripes of yellow and rose light, with lights from boats breaking up the pattern.

Above and to the left, we can see the distinctive roofline of the buildings of The Louvre, while on the right, a pair of rose lights shine, diffused and softened, through the leaves of a tree, perhaps the ancestor of one of the elms that still grow there today.

Clarence A. Gagnon (1881-1942) CAC RCA

Bright Winter Day, Baie St. Paul, 1915 Certified by Lucile Rodier Gagnon Inventory no. 395 on label to verso oil on panel 4.5x6.75 in. (11.43x17.14 cm.)

Provenance Private collection, Calgary

In the spring of 1914, with the threat of war looming in Europe, Clarence Gagnon was facing hard times in Paris. Despite critical success at his March Reitlinger Gallery show Les peinters de niege (Snow Painters), he had not sold many works. When war broke out in July, he was forced to return home to Canada, leaving his printing press and etching materials behind. He settled back in Baie-Saint-Paul, alone, as in addition to the war and poor sales, Gagnon’s marriage was unravelling.

He tried to sell some of his European works, but demand was meagre, and to supplement his income he began to hunt, and spent a great deal of time fishing, often selling his catch. These expeditions took him out into the country side around Baie-Saint-Paul, where he captured the winter light and colour of this group of buildings in his neighbourhood. The people of Baie-Saint-Paul welcomed him, and gifted him with produce, which he would return with fresh caught trout. His letters describe his own diet, which consisted mostly of apples and fish.

Despite these difficult times, Gagnon’s work from this period is excellent, filled with brightness and optimism, and giving no hint of the uncertain, challenging times he was living through. This charming pouchad is a fine example of his beautiful winter works, painted in a community that had embraced him. He was able to return to Paris briefly in 1917, settling his personal affairs, and in 1919 would remarry, settling back again in his beloved Baie-Saint-Paul with his wife Lucile Rodier, whose certification label we find on the verso of this charming work.

Marc-Aurele de foy Suzor Coté (1869-1937) CAC RCA Sunset in Winter, Arthabasca, 1907-08 signed lower left titled and signed to verso oil on board 8x10 in. (20.3x25.4 cm.)

Provenance Paul Kastel, Montreal; A.K. Prakash, Ottawa; Private collection, Vancouver; Canadian Fine Arts, Toronto Exhibited Suzor-Coté: Light and Matter, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2002 Suzor-Coté: Light and Matter, Musée du Quebec, Quebec City, 2002 Literature Laurier Lacroix, Suzor-Coté: Light and Matter, reproduced in colour, no. 54, p. 174

Arthabaska County in Quebec, north of Sherbrooke and south of Quebec City, was a place of great significance to Suzor-Coté. It was the place of his birth, and a place that he painted repeatedly.

Sunset in Arthabaska shows us Cote’s command of colour. The deepest blues of winter shadows, pink and yellow tinged sky and his characteristic heavily built up surfaces combined to give us works that are stellar examples of Canadian Impressionism in the hands of a skilled painter trained in the Barbizon school. The National Gallery of Canada included this panel in their 2002 retrospective of Suzor-Cote’s work, Suzor Coté: Light and Matter.

GROUP OF SEVEN & TOM THOMSON

Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945) RCA OSA G7 CSPWC Autumn Hillside, c. 1919 signed lower right oil on board 10x12 in. (25.4x30.5 cm.)

Provenance Joyner Fine Art, November 21, 1998; Private collection Sketch for canvas Autumn Hillside, 1920 at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The sketch Autumn Hillside by Franklin Carmichael relates directly to the well-known canvas of the same name, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, and one of their flagship Carmichael works. Light, airy, and beautifully decorative, the sketch is a dance of colour and delicate pattern, everything is awash in soft, autumnal light. Carmichael, like many of the members of the Group, worked as a commercial designer, apprenticing at Grip Ltd. beginning in 1911. His design skills are clearly evident in this work, which emanates elements of Art Nouveau in its organic and flowing lines. The arched, almost delicate branches in the bottom right corner are draped with a few last leaves, and are a particularly fine touch. Carmichael’s brushwork is impressionistic, dappled, and assured.

The colour is exceedingly fine, speaking of warm fall days, ripening foliage, and is distinctly eastern Canadian.

The aforementioned canvas dates to 1920, the year the Group of Seven was formed.

This now over 100 year old sketch celebrates this important anniversary, and is an exemplary homage to the place in Canada where the Group came into their own, where their ideas coalesced, and where they solidified their friendships, their camaraderie, and their purpose.

Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945) RCA OSA G7 CSPWC Spring, 1939 signed and dated lower right oil on board 10x12 in. (25.4x30.5 cm.)

Provenance Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal; Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary; Private collection, Tennessee; Exhibited Art Gallery of Ontario, Exhibition of Great Paintings in Aid of the Red Cross and of small pictures by members of the Ontario Society of Artists, November 15 - December 15, 1940

Spring, a delightfully energetic and pattern-dappled work, depicts the edge of a lake, set with two small cabins that we see through a screen of trees. A Thomson-esque composition, the foreground trees are placed in our very near field of view, tangled and wild, they almost obscure the scene beyond.

It is only on full examination that we see the structures, as our attention is initially drawn by other aspects of the composition. Despite the title of the work, we also see what appears to be a cascade of falling snow at the right, bright daubs of white against the blue of the lake and among the tangle of tree branches. Late spring snow - even summer snow - is typical of our Canadian climate, and an occurrence that painters found added not just a challenge, but variety to their scenery. The contrast of the bright green of new leaves to wet, almost clumpy spring snow appears as a steady theme in Canadian landscape painting.

This work is the study for the larger canvas Spring, shown at the Royal Canadian Academy Exhibition in 1940. Carmichael was a master at depicting weather effects, his small studies of snowfall, rain showers, and sunlight gleams, prove not only his skill in this area, but the frequency with which he encountered such conditions. Expressionist, impressionist, and in places almost pointillist, it is in studies such as this that we see Carmichael solidifying a uniquely Canadian style of art.

Alfred Joseph Casson (1898-1992) CGP CSPWC G7 OC POSA PRCA Mill Lake, Parry Sound, October 1932 signed lower right titled, dated 1930 and signed to verso oil on board 9.5x11.5 in. (24.1x29.2 cm.)

Provenance Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal; Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary; Private collection, Tennessee

This fine A. J. Casson comes from the last year of his association with the Group of Seven, who disbanded the same year this work was executed. Here we see him in mid-career, with elements of his Group style visible, as well as hints of the more modernist direction that would come. As always, the weather is clearly discernable in this work, the windswept cliff seems to incline away from the water, which is stirred by choppy waves that almost break into whitecaps. The weather beaten deadfall on the near shore further underscores that is a windswept beach, in wild terrain.

Mill Lake is an important location in Casson’s body of work. He painted a number of sketches, and several significant canvases in this region, being attracted to the vertical cliffs and rolling distant hills. Clouds are a strong feature in many of Casson’s works, and here they add vitality and movement to the scene, echoing the curve of the hills on the left and reinforcing Casson’s brushwork, which is a mix of gently rounded strokes, vertical licks of white, and more blocky, solid strokes of blue in the water. The curved underside of the clouds accentuates the feeling of depth and distance in this charming work, bringing our eye from the sky to the hills to the cliff, down to the water and then back again to the sky.

Alfred Joseph Casson (1898-1992) CGP CSPWC G7 OC POSA PRCA Near Credit Forks, 1926 signed lower right titled, dated and signed to verso oil on board 9.75x11.25 in. (24.8x28.6 cm.)

Provenance J. Wildridge, Toronto; Private collection Exhibited A.J. Casson Retrospective, Art Gallery of Windsor, May 14 - July 9, 1978, Art Gallery of Ontario, July 22 - August 27, 1978, catalogue no. 11

Casson first started sketching with the Group of Seven in 1926, when he was invited to replace Frank Johnston. Thrilled at this opportunity, Casson, who was much younger than any of the other Group members, took it upon himself to handle many of the chores of the sketching trips – rising early to start the fire, cooking, shaking snow off their tents and enjoying the whole experience thoroughly. He painted with them, and participated in the evening critiques, learning to see the landscape in new ways and developing his work in this positive, collegial environment. He was especially influenced by J.E.H. MacDonald, whose work he held in great esteem. Casson was ready and eager to contribute to their 1926 exhibition, and was singled out in a review that year: “The newcomer to the Group of Seven does not experiment with modernism. He is a fine colourist with a feeling for Canadian landscape. To those who know and love the scenery of civilized Ontario, Casson speaks with eloquence.”1 Casson was also elected to the Royal Canadian Academy that same year, being told, of his new association with the Group, “Watch your step, you’re keeping bad company.” 2

This vibrant sketch Near Credit Forks is all Group in its handling, colour, and composition, and rare in both its earliness and its beauty. With a close-in depth of field, predominance of pattern and sense of wild entanglement, it is a fine example of his debut as a Group member. In this “bad company” Casson would thrive, and his work would develop steadily. He continued to show as a full Group member until their dissolution in 1932.

1 Gray, Rand, and Steen. A.J. Casson: Canadian Artists Series 1. Gage Publishing, 1976, p 12.

2 Ibid

Alfred Joseph Casson (1898-1992) CGP CSPWC G7 OC POSA PRCA Magnetawan Village, 1930 signed lower right titled and dated to verso oil on board 9.5x11.25 in. (24.8x28.6 cm.)

Provenance Acquired diretly from the artist in the 1930s; By descent to private collection, Ontario; Sale of Heffel Fine Art, November 19, 2009, lot 123; Private collection

Casson was extremely fond of the scenery at Parry Sound, of which Magnetawan Village, in the Almaguin Highlands, is a fine example. He had painted buildings since his early years in Toronto, working in The Ward in the early 1920s, developing a sensitivity to them immediately. They are, in a sense, portraits of the villages themselves, capturing their character as well as their physical structures.

Occasionally, a sketch comes along that can be pinpointed to a still- standing building, as Magnetawan has many old structures, some protected as heritage sites, and a rich history.

By the 1930s Casson had seen, and was influenced by, the work of American painter Edward Hopper. While Casson is known to have admired his work, and at times, as we see here and in Schenks Store and Post Office, to echo Hopper’s stillness and concentrated gaze, Casson is devoid of Hopper’s distinct and often quite critical social commentary. His gaze is instead benign, as if through rose coloured glasses, where the intent is to see the beauty and charm of this quaint town.

Magnetawan Village has a unified, soft palette of greys and pale pinky browns, buttery greens and a touch or brighter orange. It is a fine example of Casson’s skill with subdued colour, wherein these soft tones are heightened by the blue accents on the windows of the nearest building, and set off against the billowing clouds.

Alfred Joseph Casson (1898-1992) CGP CSPWC G7 OC POSA PRCA Indian Village, 1965 oil on canvas 30x36 in. (76.2x91.4 cm.)

signed lower right titled and signed on stretcher bar to verso Provenance Sale of Sothebys Toronto, Important Canadian Art, Nov. 10, 1987, lot. 227; Private collection

In 1919, at the age of 21, A. J Casson found himself seated next to Franklin Carmichael at a desk at the design firm of Rous & Mann. Carmichael took him to lunch at the Arts & Letters Club, where the future members of the Group of Seven would often meet. It was there, and through his friendship with Carmichael, that Casson would eventually become a member of the Group, replacing Frank Johnston when he left. Casson was thrilled to be a part of this established – and by the time he joined – quite famous group, and eagerly began joining them on their wilderness sketching trips. “...

Jackson, Harris and Carmichael took me along for a two-week sketching trip. ...we camped in a spruce grove on the north shore of Lake Superior.” 1

While Casson learned much from his fellow group members, he is known for his distinctive style, one that employs elements of geometry, conveys an almost cubist sense of space, and shows us small villages and rural scenes captured with a unique feeling for their structure, setting and charm. He was attuned to his scenes in the same way that Jackson was attuned to the St Lawrence and its rural villages.

Casson’s work is identifiable at once – his style, his touch, and his brushwork are unique – delicate and bold at the same time, wherein houses and churches, forests and grasslands, people and animals are handled with a cohesive unity that speaks always of the weather. Wind, rain, or sunshine, whatever the scene holds is consistently echoed in each element of the work. As a modernist, his influence can be found in the generations of landscape painters that have since followed.

1. Gray, Rand, and Steen. A.J. Casson: Canadian Artists Series 1. Gage Publishing, 1976, p 10.

Alfred Joseph Casson (1898-1992) CGP CSPWC G7 OC POSA PRCA Schenks Store and Post Office, Glen Williams, ON signed lower left oil on panel 9.5x11.5 in. (24.1x29.2 cm.)

Provenance Private collection

The charming building, set in the village of Glen Williams, Ontario, depicted in this fine Casson panel has an interesting history, going back as far as 1857. The fact that is was still standing when Casson painted it was remarkable, as so many buildings met their fate in a fiery demise prior to modern fire proofing and fire-fighting. The fact that it is intact today is even more remarkable.

Built by James Laidlaw, and now called The Laidlaw House, its first role was as a home and grocery store. It was seized and sold when Laidlaw defaulted on the mortgage in 1869. It subsequently became a tin shop, then reverted to grocery store, and then in 1877 the post office was added. It has taken on many roles in the years since, everything from pottery shop to ice cream parlour to beauty salon in recent times, to a liquor store in the years prior to prohibition. At the time Casson painted it, it was a general store (that sold ice cream) under lease to William Schenk. It is now home to Reeve & Clarke Books, purveyor of fine and rare books.

Canada’s art history is rich with stories such as the one that this work tells, in which we can examine a work in detail, discovering our history in the process. The Laidlaw House was designated as a Heritage Property in 2010, and it seems quite fitting that it is now a rare bookstore, as Casson’s treatment of it seems to rarefy the building itself, which seems to sit so peacefully amoung the trees.

With the shade of dancing shadows, the awning stretched out over multi-paned windows, and the street winding its way to the front door, it gently and warmly invites us in.

Alfred Joseph Casson (1898-1992) CGP CSPWC G7 OC POSA PRCA Farm at Carnarvon, 1940 signed lower right signed and titled to verso oil on panel 9.5x11.5 in. (24.1x29.2 cm.)

Provenance Libby’s of Toronto, Toronto; Private collection

Farm at Carnarvon exemplifies A.J. Casson’s excellent colour sense and finely honed knowledge of design. By 1940, he had been working as a designer for over 20 years, and would not retire from that work to paint full time until 1957. These design skills would form a solid foundation for Casson’s paintings throughout his life. Farm at Carnarvon is a bucolic work, depicting another of Casson’s frequent sketching haunts, Carnarvon, Ontario, in the Algonquin Highlands, a group of hamlets west of Haliburton that also includes Dorset, Stanhope and Oxtongue Lake. These places were the inspiration for several works by Casson, as he often painted along their connecting road - Highway 35.

Many of Casson’s large canvases depict this region.

The charming farmhouse and its outbuildings sit at the foot of a tree covered hillside that rolls off into the distance, losing detail as it meets and blends into the clouded sky. A bright patch of sunlit field sets the farm off against the hill, and anchors the scene with another patch of bright grasses in front of the farmhouse. The greyed buildings seem to have sprung from the ground itself, and are completely at home in the landscape. The ramshackle fence, so characteristic of this region, adds weight on the right, balancing out the chimney pots on the taller house at the left. All of this is rendered in Casson’s even, assured brushwork. This farm is still standing, one of the Algonquin Highlands’ windows into history.

Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald (1890-1956) CGO G7 MSA Nasturtiums, 1929 oil on canvas 6.75x10.25 in. (17x26 cm)

inscribed to verso:

by L. Lemoine FitzGerald, Winnipeg (c.1929), given to his daughter Mrs. Hugh W. Morrison (née Patricia LeMoine Fitzgerald) (Toronto) Provenance Collection of Patricia LeMoine Fitzgerald, Toronto; Private collection, Calgary Exhibited A Passion for Art: Works from Private Collections, The Glenbow Museum, Calgary, December 3, 1994 – January 29, 1995

Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald was born in Winnipeg and was largely self-taught. Aside from night school classes and formative trip to New York in 1922, when he worked with the Art Student’s League, he developed his own artistic practice. It is due to these factors, and to his surroundings in Manitoba, that he is so very unique in the annals of Canadian art. Nasturtiums is at a glance instantly recognizable as a work by Fitzgerald. His soft colour, the ‘seen as if from a standing position’ composition, the mosaic of gentle daubs of paint, and the simple, almost spiritually reverent arrangement of the nasturtiums in the humble jar of water are classic Fitzgerald. The choice of nasturtiums – a reliable prairie summer flower – seems apt, and the verso inscription, gifting the work to his daughter Patricia, adds poignancy.

Fitzgerald is known as a deeply observant painter, taking inspiration from his immediate surroundings. Potted plants, windowsills, and views of the Canadian prairie beyond them would lead eventually to abstract works based on the same themes. In the latter part of his career, these abstracts would lighten into faintly painted works and chalk drawings that seem to be almost ghosts of the things he observed. This mid-career work speaks to both bodies of work, being rooted in the early paintings, and foreshadowing the abstracts that were to come.

Lawren Stewart Harris (1885-1970) ALC BCFSA CGP FCA G7 OSA RPS TPG Autumn Landscape, c. 1920 signed lower left oil on board 10.5x14 in. (26.7x35.6 cm.)

Provenance Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal; Private collection

By the fall of 1920, the members of the Group of Seven had their first exhibition under their belts, an early May show in Toronto that “was a statement about both their somewhat tempestuous history and their current activities and goals.”1 They had staked their claim and stood their ground through criticism, and had deepened their commitment to their cause, encouraged by the accolades of their supporters. The fall sketching trips that year came on the heels of not only the Group’s first show in Toronto, but the formation of the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal. The Beaver Hall artists took courage from the Group’s show and organized themselves very quickly, forming later that same month and exhibiting for the first time the following January. Things were happening in art in Canada, it was a heady time.

Harris’ work at this point still shows lingering hints of his impressionist works, which we can see here in the shoreline and water, but the characteristically smooth, liquid brushwork of his Group period shows in the trees. The typically dark water – be it river or lake – is still, reflecting the changing colours in the foliage of the shoreline trees. The stand of towering evergreens behind act as a backdrop, giving depth and structure to the scene against a soaring sky. It is finely and consistently handled, with the pale, apricot orange of shoreline foliage brightening and adding sparkle at the edges of the inky water

1 Hill, Charles C. The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation. National Gallery of Canada and McClelland & Stewart, 1995, p 89.

Lawren Stewart Harris (1885-1970) ALC BCFSA CGP FCA G7 OSA RPS TPG

Sand Lake Algoma, c. 1921 Algoma Sketch CXXXIII signed and titled Algoma Sketch CXXXIII on artist’s label to verso inscribed with Doris Mills Inventory #2/133, the artist’s symbol and ST#G320, c. 1921 signed lower right oil on board 10.75x14 in. (27.3x35.6 cm.)

Provenance The Art Emporium, Vancouver, 1984; Private collection, Vancouver; Sale of Heffel Fine Art, Fine Canadian Art, November 23, 2016, lot. 135; Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary; Private collection, Ontario Literature Doris Mills, L.S. Harris Inventory, 1926, Algoma Sketches, Group 2, listed, cataloge #2/133, location noted as Studio Building; Paul Duval, Lawren Harris: Where the Universe Sings, 2011, pgs. 159 and 159

In the spring of 1918, Lawren Harris visited Algoma as part of his recuperative process after a breakdown and discharge from the army during WWI. A sensitive individual, Harris could not reconcile what he had experienced overseas while in Toronto: nature was the only answer. His friend Dr. James MacCallum took him north of Sault Ste. Marie, and into some of the most picturesque country in eastern Canada. Wild and inaccessible, Algoma’s rivers, lakes, canyons, and waterfalls were exactly what Harris needed. He embraced the scenery, letting the atmosphere of the forest wash over him. The experience re-engaged him with his art, and allowed him to conquer his demons.

Back in Toronto, he boasted of the area’s endless subject matter to his fellow artists, and J.E.H. MacDonald, A.Y. Jackson, and Frank Johnston. Johnston and MacDonald joined Harris and MacCallum when they returned again that fall. While the spring scenery was impressive, the colours of autumn were double inspiring. An ever changing tapestry of colour, bursts of brilliant gold, dashes of bright red, accents of orange and yellow, all set against rich and varied greens. This work comes from a few years later in 1921, when Jackson was also on the trip, and is one of several studies that Harris executed at this small lake. It relates directly to the major canvas Reflections, Sand Lake, in the Sobey Art Foundation collection. These trips were the beginning of a long association with Algoma and the famous boxcar trips using the Algoma Central Railway car, outfitted with bunk beds and a stove, and moved from siding to siding, serving as home base for daily painting excursions and evening critiques. It was thus that Algoma gave rise to some of Canada’s finest art.

Alexander Young Jackson (1882-1974) ALC CGP G7 OSA RCA RSA St. Fidele, Quebec, 1926 signed lower left oil on board 8.5x10.5 in. (21.6x26.7 cm.)

Provenance Private collection; Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary; Private collection, Tennessee

Jackson’s spring sketching trips took him to St. Fidèle and La Malbaie, in Quebec. St. Fidèle was an agricultural community, with a small logging economy as well. As with most Quebec communities, the town was built around a central church (or churches). Here we have a side view of the Church of Saint-Fidèle, built in 1853 as a small chapel and enlarged to the present day church in 1898. It has a typical yet distinct square portal (or spire) that we can see in the sketch, yet the cross that tops it is out of our view. Jackson painted this church many times, and from different vantage points, including A Quebec Village (Winter, Saint- Fidèle), now in a private collection. He has surrounded it here with the town’s other buildings, making the church less the focus of the scene than the village and the sleigh, the latter of which rests, unhitched, in the near-ground snow. It is a quiet scene, no people are about, no footprints or tracks of any kind can be seen, and the empty sleigh reinforces their absence.

A thin thread of smoke drifts from one of the central buildings, and the hint of what may be a road — to the right of the sleigh — are the only indication of human occupation.

Alexander Young Jackson (1882-1974) ALC CGP G7 OSA RCA RSA April Afternoon, Les Eboulements, Quebec April 1931 signed lower left oil on board 8.5x10.5 in. (21.6x26.7 cm.)

Inscribed to verso: A.Y. Jackson / 6282 Terrebone Ave / Montreal; Les Eboulements Que. / April 1931 Provenance Peter Ohler Sr., Vancouver; Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary; Private collection, Tennessee Exhibited Canadian National Exhibition, Department of Small Pictures, Toronto, 1931, cat. no. 660; Art Gallery of Ontario, label to verso

By way of routine, A.Y. Jackson made a late spring trip to lower Quebec to his favourite sketching grounds every year. 1931 found him at Les Eboulements, and he would have been 49 the year this work was painted. Les Eboulements – the landslides – is a region named for geographic features resulting from a 1663 earthquake that shook Charlevoix. It is one of the most picturesque regions of Canada, and having caught the eye of artists for generations, it was a particular favourite of Jackson’s.

Here, Jackson has painted the houses and barns as if they are asleep, blanketed in deep blue, white and brown, the sun low in the sky. Everything casts a liquid shadow on the knee-deep snow, including the lone figure trudging down the road, having just passed a wayside cross. Jackson’s limited palette of white, brown, blue, and green is accented by a spot of orange in the cap of the figure, orange that melts into the figure’s scarf, also caught in shadow.

Frank Hans Johnston (1888-1949) ARCA CSPWC G7 OSA Sketch in Algoma oil on panel 6x9 in. (15.2x22.9 cm)

Inscribed to verso: SKETCH IN ALGOMA by FRANK H. JOHNSTON $30.00 Provenance Collection of Herbert L. Rous, co-owner of Rous and Mann; Private collection by descent

Sketch in Algoma has all the characteristics of a work executed on the now famous pre- Group of Seven box-car trips of 1918 or 1919. Its vertical format, near ground field of view, colour play and focus on pattern echo works attributed to those years. It is a gem of painting, sparkling and bright, the yellow and orange autumn leaves are a perfect colour compliment to the greenish blue hill – perhaps a canyon side cliff face – beyond. Add the vertical tree limbs, giving structure to the work in brown, and you have a very fine painting. Further to this, the works comes to sale from the prestigious collection of Herbert L. Rous, co-owner of Rous and Mann, the design firm where Johnston worked at the time.

Johnston’s Algoma works are beautiful passages of landscape painting. As a subject, Algoma was challenging, with steep, vertical canyon walls, unexpected waterfalls, and lush forests, “where to see the sky, one must through his head well back.” It was scenery “charted on a grand scale, slashed by ravines and canyons through which run rivers, streams and springs broadening into lakes, churning lightly over shoaly places or dropping with and a mist for hundreds of feet.”1 Subject matter like this did not suit every painter, but to Johnston it was ideal. His design training, his eye for pattern and his sense of the ornamental was manifested in sinuous lines, rich colour, and a strong sense of the organic in his Algoma works.

1. Mason, Roger Burford. A Grand Eye for Glory: The Life of Franz Johnston. Dundurn Press, 1998, p. 32.

Frank Hans Johnston (1888-1949) ARCA CSPWC G7 OSA A Lake in Autumn, Algoma, c. 1918 oil on panel 9.5x6 in. (24.1x15.2 cm.)

Provenance Collection of F.H. Brigden, Toronto, label to verso; Private collection, Toronto

Like the work Sketch in Algoma, A Lake in Autumn, Algoma, comes to sale from an important collection, that of Canadian artist and founder of one of Canada’s most important historical design firms, F.H. Brigden. This delightful small panel shows us Frank Johnston’s skill with the challenging scenery at Algoma. From high atop a ridge, we look down onto a blue pool of water, either a lake or a bend in a river, far below us. The water is bookended by trees, an evergreen on the right and the skeletal limbs of two additional trees on the left. The near ground forest floor and distant hillside are daubed with gold as sunlight gilds the land. Johnston’s careful brushwork, mostly vertical in application, adds the feeling of cloisonné enamel work to the panel.

Johnston took a hiatus from his work with the Canadian War Memorials in the fall of 1918 to participate in the boxcar trip, no doubt Lawren Harris’s enthusiastic reports from his Algoma sojourn with James MacCallum persuaded him. The remote beauty and rugged scenery of Algoma was accessible only by the Algoma Central Railway, provider of the now infamous ACR 10557 boxcar.

These iconic trips are a key passage in Canadian art history, central to the formation of the Group of Seven in 1920, and a brilliant thread in the tapestry of the Group of Seven.

Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) AAM CGP CSPWC G7 OSA RCA Pines and Sumac, Georgian Bay, 1946 signed A. Lismer and dated ’46 lower right signed, titled and dated on artist’s label to verso oil on board 12x15.75 in. (30.5x40 cm.)

Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by Theodosia Dawes Bond Thornton, January 13, 1949 for $37.50; Estate of Theodosia Dawes Bond Thornton, Montreal; Sale of Heffel Fine Art, November 25, 2010, lot #166; Private collection Literature Lois Darroch, Bright Land, A Warm Look at Arthur Lismer, 1981, p.104; Theodosia Dawes Bond Thornton, Personal Art Collection Catalogue, reproduced, unpaginated, cat. R19

Georgian Bay was a central location in the life of Arthur Lismer. It was there, he felt, that he truly found himself as a painter. It was his Lake O’Hara, his Lake Superior, his rural Quebec. Each member of the Group of Seven found a region of Canada where the scenery resonated exactly with the intent of their art, and for Lismer, it was Georgian Bay. Pines and Sumac, Georgian Bay is a fine example of this, where the wild forest, with its particular tangle of vegetation, the windswept shapes of the trees, the exposed rock and variety of colour are captured in vibrant, almost frenzied brushwork. We can feel the forest blowing when we look at this work.

The estate of Theodosia Dawes Bond Thornton (1915 – 2009) contained some of the most important works in Canadian art. The daughter of a Vice-President and General Manager for the Canadian National Railway’s central region, she was able to travel to many of the locations depicted by the Group of Seven as a child. On a school trip to the National Gallery of Canada at the age of 16, she encountered Group works, and having a profound reaction, was flooded with memories of the trips with her father. “That was the art I saw” she would later recall, and her destiny as a collector was sealed. She collected the very finest examples of Canadian art, of which this is one.

Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) AAM CGP CSPWC G7 OSA RCA Storm Clouds, 1925 signed lower left titled Storm Clouds and signed to verso oil on board 13x15.75 in. (33x40 cm.)

Provenance Estate of Arthur Lismer, stamp to verso; Private collection; Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary; Private collection, Tennessee;

This small study of storm clouds is a playful, rather whimsical study of weather. Clouds billow, wind blows and tree limbs bend. Even the small houses, seen on the right of the work, seem to be drawn up tightly, huddled against the storm. We cannot tell if the storm is coming or going, only that it is wild. Although thinly painted with a muted palette, Lismer is observing the clouds carefully.

Storms, and other interesting cloud patterns, figure prominently in Lismer’s oeuvre, he was unafraid of tackling their ever-changing formations. In many of his major canvases, including Evening Silhouette from 1926, in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection wherein he tackles a fish-bone formation of clouds arcing across the sky, and Quebec Uplands, from 1925, in a private collection, where the cloud formations relate directly to those shown here. Weather is often referenced in his titles as well, with September Gale, A Westerly Gale, Georgian Bay, and Rain in the North Country being amoung his best known works.

Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) AAM CGP CSPWC G7 OSA RCA Georgian Bay, c. 1932 signed and titled to verso oil on board 12x16 in. (30.5x40.6 cm.)

Provenance Charles Hendry, Toronto; Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary; Private collection, Tennessee

In her book Bright Land: A Warm Look at Arthur Lismer, Lois Darroch writes, “...Lismer’s sense of the everlasting came through a feeling for a life force. This life force permeated every facet of flora and fauna, earth and water. Lismer’s feeling for growth lent a drama and a vitality to whatever he painted. Storm or stillness, sun or shadow, rock or tree, every animate or inanimate thing vibrated for him, and his portrayals are as varied as his subjects.”1 She is referring to Lismer’s desire to “boil down... his own optical impression to diminutive proportions and yet retain the quality and identity of the whole. His sketch becomes the unit... from which nature took its theme.”2

In this delicate Georgian Bay sketch, Lismer’s theme seems to be one of sunlight, which accents the rocks, brightens the deciduous tree’s limbs and leaves, causing them to sparkle and dance against the darker conifers behind them. Clouds, so often a feature in his work, peek through the background trees, unifying the whole scene.

1 Darroch, Lois. Bright Land: A Warm Look at Arthur Lismer. Merritt Publishing Company Limited, 1981. p. 104 2 Ibid.

Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) AAM CGP CSPWC G7 OSA RCA Rocks and Pine Trees, 1938 signed lower right oil on board, double sided 16x20 in. (40.6x50.8 cm. ) Provenance Private collection

This work likely depicts Georgian Bay, it has all the traits and characteristic of having been painted at one of his preferred locations there, somewhere in “The Happy Isles” as he called them. A very dynamic work, swirling and tightly composed, we seem to be looking straight down a cliff face into the valley below, with a river or lake’s edge beyond that. Lismer experimented with composition often, the tangled, dense growth of the Georgian Bay shorelines required this, it was not an easy subject to tackle. The work also has echoes of his west coast tangles, and Lismer had been to Hawaii in 1938, as well as Australia and New Zealand the year before.

James Edward Hervey MacDonald (1873-1932) G7 OSA RCA

Mt. Odaray, Lake O’Hara Area, 1929 signed, titled Mt. Oderay (left) and dated 1929 to verso oil on panel 8.5x10.5 in. (21.6x26.7 cm.)

Sketch for Lichened Rocks, Mountain Majesty, in the University College Art Collection, University of Toronto Art Centre.

Provenance Thoreau MacDonald, Toronto; Private collection, Prince George; Masters Gallery, Calgary; Private collection, Tennessee

This remarkable sketch relates directly to one of J.E.H. MacDonald’s most important Lake O’Hara canvases, Lichened Rocks, Mountain Majesty, in the University College Art Collection, University of Toronto Art Centre. That the canvas dates to 1928 and the sketch comes from 1929 is not unusual, as MacDonald had several haunts at Lake O’Hara, places that he would return to frequently, having found what he felt to be one of the most important things in landscape painting – a comfortable place to sit.

Set from the same high-up vantage point looking at Mount Odaray and Deception Peak, with the same near-ground attention to the map and crust lichens that grow everywhere at this elevation, MacDonald has focused the large rock that occupies the centre of the scene. The small, triangular form in the space between the near-ground rock and Deception Peak on the right is the Swiss Guides Monument. In the canvas, it is quite clear that the lichen-dotted feature in the near-ground is a point of rock, rather than a distant peak, as it seems to be in the sketch. A comparison of the two makes it clear where MacDonald was going with this sketch. The intent of the study was, as MacDonald taught his students, to capture the idea. “Try to have an idea in your sketch as well as a view” he wrote in his lecture notes, “...profile is the limit of a solid mass, even though that solidity has the different qualities of cloud and rock. Design from nature rather than copy her. You will find a general trail in the lines and masses under varying details... Trees grow and clouds float but Art has a world of her own where science is not so absolute.”

James Edward Hervey MacDonald Larches, Mountain Lake September 13, 1929 signed and dated lower left oil on panel 8.5x10.5 in. (21.6x26.7 cm.)

(1873-1932) G7 OSA RCA

Provenance Private collecion, Toronto; Sale of Sotheby’s Canada, May 19, 1993, lot #115; Private collection; Sale of Heffel Fine Art, May 29, 2019; Private collection Literature Paul Duval, The Tangled Garden: The Art of J.E.H. MacDonald, pp. 142-143

1929 was J.E.H. MacDonald’s sixth visit to the Lake O’Hara region of Yoho National Park, British Columbia, in the Rocky Mountains of western Canada. He was obsessed with the scenery there, and that year, his attention was taken by the larch trees. He arrived in early September (as we know from a sketch painted on the 5th) to find the larches beginning to turn. The weather conditions that fall, his familiarity with the trails and meadows, and his utter delight in being back in place he so loved, combined to give us an artistic survey of the Lyall’s Larch in their fullest range of fine autumnal glory.

These uniquely charming, deciduous conifers have leaf-like needles that change colour in the fall. In MacDonald’s 1929 paintings we see in them dancing from shades of green through to gold, charting the transition of their bright, forest green leaves from their summer colours through an intense chartreuse green, then a pale lime green that then morphs into a softy buttery yellow, and finally ripens to a saffron orange over the winter as the four-sided leaves dry out and fall.

Sprinkled on the early snow, or as seen in this work against the blue-green waters of McArthur Lake and the heath-crusted ground, they are a delightful and attractive colour contrast in the landscape. MacDonald further accentuates these two solitary trees by bathing them in sunlight that electrifies their colours and heightens our focus on them. They are actors, posing at centre stage.

He underlines this focus by capturing the foreground tree’s deeply cast shadow in a rich brown tinged with purple that is not only reminiscent of the greyish-purple of larch bark, but repeated in the shadow on the rock face on the far side of the lake, drawing our eye up to the mountain face.

MacDonald was a superb colourist who used a minimal palette of carefully chosen hues in a simple composition. The purple accents in Larches and Mountain Lake serve to intensify the colour of the larches, and together with his calligraphic brushwork, and stage-like view, create a scene that is enlivened and bright. One can almost feel the breeze tousling the supple branches of these two young larch trees.

MacDonald was not only visually taken by these unique trees, he also wrote about them in his journals, even composing poems, odes to their kaleidoscopic fall colour. In his 1924 lecture “A Glimpse of the West”, delivered to his students at the Ontario College of Art and published that November in The Canadian Bookman, he wrote of his affection of the O’Hara landscape, singling out the larch trees, “…and there are the trees, the spruce and the balsam and the plumy Lyall’s Larch. This last especially a beautiful colour note in my memory as it began to get the gold of autumn on it before I came away, and that, with the delicate purple grey of the branches mingling with it made a dream tree of paradise.” In the fall of 1928, he wrote a poem in his journal, describing the advance of fall colour up from the prairies to the mountains:

But yesterday the sleety wind Hissed in the mountains larch And now the yellow prairie spreads The sheaves in endless march

The turn of the larches in the Canadian Rockies is a visually delightful time, one that MacDonald was harmoniously in tune with, one that he painted and wrote of often - a reoccurring character in his Lake O’Hara stories. The shoreline of McArthur Lake, where these two trees are growing in the sketch, is today dotted with older, larger, specimens and their younger offspring. It is likely that among them, gnarled and wizened and shaped by the weather, stand these two same trees, now almost a century older.

James Edward Hervey (J.E.H.) MacDonald (1873-1932) G7 OSA RCA Little Lake Near Lake Oesa, Oesa Trail, Lake O’Hara Camp, c. 1926 signed and titled on artist’s label to verso oil on panel 8.5x10.5 in. (21.6x26.6 cm)

Provenance Collection of E.R. Hunter, author of J.E.H. MacDonald: A Biography and Catalogue of His Work (1940); Private collection, Calgary Exhibited The Group of Seven in Western Canada, The Glenbow Museum, June - November 2000, no. 73; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, November 2002 - February 2003; Winnipeg Art Gallery, February 22 - May 18, 2003; Art Gallery of Great Victoria, June - September 2003; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, October 2003 - January 2004

J.E.H. MacDonald’s artistic allegiance to the scenery of Lake O’Hara is evident in the variety of locations he accessed, the different vistas he painted, and the full sampling of Canadian Rockies weather he captured them in. This brilliant scene is a sunlit gem of a work, depicting a spot painted not only by MacDonald, but by his fellow founding Group of Seven members, Arthur Lismer and Lawren Harris. Today, we call the small tarn he has depicted Lefroy Lake. Hikers familiar with the Lake O’Hara trail system will know this appealing spot well, it is one of the many charming small lakes that dot the trailside while you are ascending to, or descending from, Lake Oesa. It is an idyllic spot, beckoning hikers to stop for tea, or to rock hop to the little lake to just to sit, and spend some time watching the shadows play across the glaciers on the mountains above.

MacDonald has captured the scene in brilliant hues, the sun paints the glacier that sweeps down under the shoulder of Mount Ringrose – the central peak – a clear, clean white. Swirling blue serpentine shadows describe the rugged profile of the peaks above. A tiny triangle of sky nips in at the top of the work just right of centre, showing us the steepness of the mountain’s incline, and hinting at the sun that we know is shining above. The distinctive rocky bluff below and to the left of the glacier is a bedding plane of ancient rock, crusted with colourful lichens so characteristic of the O’Hara region, and cracked into huge blocks by the forces of ice, water, and time. At Lefroy Lake, water flows in by Karst as well above ground in a stream, making for an increased variety of colour possibilities. Lake O’Hara is renowned for her spectacularly coloured lakes, and Lefroy Lake is one of the finest jewels in the Lake O’Hara crown.

MacDonald’s palette in this work is extremely rich, and conveys the lushness of this spot well, it is awash in blue and green, and tied together with an earthy brown, the latter colour being so saturated that it begs the question of whether the work might have been painted immediately after a rain. Indeed, all seems as if wet, the colours intense, the richness heightened. In his journals, MacDonald describes many instances of hiding out from bad weather in the lee of a rock or under a tree, and then hurrying to capture the scene as sunshine returned. These were moments MacDonald revelled in, loving the wildness of it all, and seeking to capture the essence of the moment. It is as if curtains have been drawn back, revealing Mount Ringrose at centre stage. But it is in the water in the foreground where MacDonald’s technique really sings. He presents one side of the small lake – the left third – as a smooth sheet of glass, and the other two-thirds – demarcated by the upside-down refection of the curved glacier – as a dance of colour on water stirred by a slight breeze. Of a similar moment not far from this spot, in his 1930 Lake O’Hara journal, he wrote, “… such delicacy of shadow on Lefroy… and such beauty of colour in lake. The lighter poem of wind breaking, the vividness of blue green where sun touches smooth water and blending of smooth water in light from dark blue-green to fullness of green near foreground. Try painting for this effect.” It is an O’Hara moment, a Canadian Rockies moment, one that tells us this painter spent time observing, that his desire was to capture a truly authentic portrait of the everchanging face of nature, to paint the quickly fleeting flashes of beauty in the natural world, ones that stand out, that truly speak of wind, weather, rock, and water, and the lighter poems of wind breaking.

This work comes through the collection of Edmund Robert Hunter, one of J.E.H. MacDonald’s early biographers. Hunter published his book on MacDonald, including a catalogue raisonne of his work, in 1940. It would later be redesigned by MacDonald’s son Thoreau and reissued in a 1949 edition of 500.

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) OSA Spring, Algonquin Park, Summer 1914 estate stamp lower right oil on wood panel 8.5x10.5 in. (21.3 x 26.3 cm) Catalogue Raisonné no. 1914.45 Provenance Laing Galleries, Toronto, c. 1942-43; The Rt. Hon. Malcolm MacDonald, Ottawa, ON; Private collection, Ottawa; Joyner Toronto, 1 June 2004, lot 51; Private Collection, Vancouver; Literature Reid, Dennis and Charles C. Hill. Tom Thomson, 2002. Exhibition catalogue, pp. 31, 125, 183.

The short painting career of Tom Thomson has garnered more scrutiny, more study, and has generated more intrigue than many Canadian artists with much longer and more prolific careers. While his life, and especially his death, are fascinating stories with chapters yet to be written, it is the work itself that drives this continued scholarship.

Tom Thomson was an unhesitating painter. Without pretence or self-consciousness, his art developed quickly, and on fertile ground that was shaped largely by his periods of self-isolation and tenacious drive. Spring, Algonquin Park is a moody, saturated work, touched with red and yellow, and brilliant in its colour. Joan Murray relates the work to Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park, painted the following fall, (1916.131). Both are rich studies with dominating, agitated skies. In Spring, Algonquin Park, the majority of the composition is taken up by sky, which, despite the fact that it is more simply painted than the buildings, hills, and water on the land, dominates through sheer visual force. Tour de force might be a better term, as the sky’s presence overshadows everything else in the scene, swirling, as it seems to, up and out of the lake and into the atmosphere.

The summer of 1914 saw Thomson working at Algonquin Park alone in early August. He arrived there by canoe, having left Georgian Bay to paddle and portage via the French River, Lake Nipissing, and the South River into the park. Jackson would join him at Canoe Lake in mid-September, and they would work there, as well as at both Ragged and Smoke Lakes, returning back to Canoe Lake

by October, when the Lismers (Arthur and Esther, and their daughter Marjorie), and Frederick and Maud Varley would join them. From all reports, Thomson’s work was praised, Jackson writing, “Tom is doing some exciting stuff. He keeps one up to time. Very often I have to figure out if I am leading or following.” While A.Y. Jackson is often cited as an influence, J.W. Beatty’s lead cannot be ignored. In Thomson’s skies, his swirling wild brushwork, his propensity for night time scenes, and his authenticity to the scene, the influence of Beatty is strongly felt. Both of these painters also influenced Thomson’s methods, and in the winter of 1913-1914, Thomson constructed for himself a sketching box based on those used by Beatty and Jackson, replacing his heavier 1912 box with this new, light weight one. It held three 8 .5 x 10.5 inch wooden panels, which he would begin using (instead of canvas glued to boards) in the summer of 1914. We know from the Thomson catalogue raisonné that this work comes from that period, and in fact depicts summer, not spring and may have been executed that August, before Jackson arrived.

Frederick Horsman Varley

(1881-1969) ARCA G7 OSA

Snow People titled and signed with artist’s address to verso oil on board 12x15 in. (21.6x26.6 cm) Varley Inventory no. 13, label to verso Provenance Roberts Gallery, Toronto; McCready Galleries Inc., Toronto; Private collection

Frederick Varley’s whimsical and imaginative work Snow People depicts a group of what we assume are children, playing in a forest heavily encrusted with snow. It is possible that these figures include his son John, and that this work was painted in British Columbia, where he moved in 1924 and where John accompanied his father on a number of sketching trips. Other works known to be of John approximate the age and stature of the figure with his back to us, hiding behind a snow-covered tree.

This is speculation though, not proven by any fact. The only facts we do have are that this is a joyous work, with rich swirls of delicious colour, and a sense of pure delight in this winter wonderland of snow. Almost abstract, the trees take the form of crouching angels, and the figures hiding amoung them are caught in a magical, marvelous, dream-like, white world.

Varley was indeed a virtuoso colourist, his works often seem to contain an inner glow, sometimes golden – as we see in his portrait of his son John, sometimes green – as with his portrait of Vera from 1930, or red, as with his Gypsy Head from 1919. (All these works, National Gallery of Canada). Here, in this exuberant scene, the inner glow is white, emanating from a surreal forest of swirling colour and winter form.

GROUP CONTEMPORARIES

John William Beatty (1869-1941) OSA RCA Lake Edith, Jasper Park, 1914 signed lower left oil on board 8x10 in. (20.3x25.4 cm.)

Provenance Private Collection, Alberta; Canadian Art Galleries, Calgary; By descent to Private Collection, Alberta; Sale of Cowley Abbot, May 28, 2019; Private collection

In the summer of 1914, John William Beatty was in Jasper National Park, together with A.Y. Jackson, on a sketching trip to gather material for The Canadian Northern Railway. The Northern was the competition for The Grand Trunk Pacific, and having built their lines at great expense, they needed clients. Artwork was the main calling card for the west at the time, and Beatty and Jackson had a job to do, create great work to entice travellers to board the train. They worked in the vicinity of the line, walking the short distance from it to Lakes Edith and Annette, and then Lac Beauvert, near Jasper Park Lodge. They also worked along the Athabasca River, and in the vicinity of Jasper townsite. Beatty’s delicate painting depicts the lake bordered by glowing fall colour. He worked in an impressionistic manner, with a delicate and sensitive touch, showing us the mountains that are now home to Marmot Basin ski hill, with Lake Edith in the near ground. It is a charming and idyllic work.

Emily Carr

(1871-1945) BCFSA CGP Forest Light, British Columbia, 1935 signed lower left oil on paper 34x22 in. (86.4x55.9 cm.)

Provenance Dominion Gallery, Montreal; Mayberry Fine Art; Private collection

“For Emily Carr, trees were animate beings, exemplary in their vitality and drive.”1 She felt akin to them, saw their need, as living things, to grow in their own ways, according to their own kind. She herself had struggled to do this her whole life. Only in the last years of her practice was she given any accolades, and by that time, had found other ways to assure herself that she was doing something of value, and distained, for the most part, the attention she was given. Her published writings, her journal keeping, and above all, her art, was her growth, and her life was lived according to her own terms.

In her oil on paper studies of trees from the 1930s, we can see that her interest is in their life force. She renders not just the patterns of trunks, the sway and weight of boughs, the arc and line of limbs as they strain for the sky, but the life force within them that creates these patterns, the arcs, this strain. “Listen,” she wrote in her journal, “this perhaps is the way to find that thing I long for: go into the woods alone and look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, live ground, each seed according to its own kind expanding, bursting, pushing its way upward towards the light and air, each one knowing what to do, each demanding its on rights on earth.”2

In the delicate and light filled glade at the centre of Forest Light, British Columbia, we see a young tree asserting its rights, growing, soft and supple, straining at the light that falls on it. It’s bright, new green is a marked contrast to the silvery dead trunk to the right and the other darker tress behind it. The forest floor at the young tree’s feet is pooled with light, and all seems still, almost reverent, in the space around this young tree. The mossy feature - a rock or stump - in the lower left corner is near to us, a feature behind which we can keep a respectful distance while witnessing the tree, caught in a moment of sanctity, and bathed in forest light.

1. Sarah Milroy and Ian Desjardin, editors. From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia. Goose Lane, 2015, p. 223 2. Ibid

Frank Hennessey (1893-1941) Village in the Snow signed lower left oil on board 14x14 in. (35.6x35.6 cm.)

Provenance Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal; Frank Jarman Ltd., Ottawa; Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary; Private collection, Tennessee

Frank Charles Hennessey was born in Ottawa and lived his entire life there, painting the nearby Laurentians, small rural villages, and scenes in Canada’s capital city. His list of memberships and accolades is long, and includes full membership in the Royal Canadian Academy, the Ontario Society of Artists, the Ottawa Studio Club, the Ottawa Group, in addition to his being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Artists. He participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in Wembley, and the 1927 Exposition D’Art Canadien at Le Musée de Jue de Paume in Paris, showing a work owned by the National Gallery of Canada. His career is remarkable, includes a trip to the Arctic in 1908, considerably early, as an artist naturalist. He worked with the 1913 Geological Survey and eventually joined the department of Agriculture’s Entomology Division as an illustrator. All the while, still painting landscapes and scenes of daily life.

As an observer of the fine detail of the natural world, Hennessey was especially adept. His snow scenes are a delight, subtle and muted, Village in the Snow emanates cold. The near-ground dots of snow are expertly handled, feeling as if they are in our space as a viewer, rather than belonging to the scene.

Frank Hennessey (1893-1941) The Red Sleigh, 1929 oil on canvas 22x27 in. (55.9x68.6 cm.)

Provenance Continental Galleries, Montreal; Private collection, by descent

As an illustrator, Frank Hennessey honed his skills as a draughtsman finely. He was also keenly adept at composition and colour, and of how to arrange a work. The Red Sleigh is an excellent example of his ability to lead us into the scene. Here, the horse and sleigh draw us along. We will turn and head off between the homes in a moment, moving through the curve in the snow, following the pair of figures who are also walking that way. An additional curved fence takes us even further into the distance, where a bright orange home sits, partially obscured from our view.

In addition to his many accomplishments, Frank Hennessey was also a teacher. Student Anthony Law recalled that “Hennessey was a practical exponent of the pastel medium and used chalks with vigour and confidence. The country under snow was an alluring time of year for him, as were the spring thaw and the break-up on rivers. He enjoyed painting the subtle obscurities that came with sundown on winter days. Hennessey, who excelled in oils as well, taught the young artist how to interpret the wilderness on canvas...�

Randolph Stanley Hewton

(1888-1960) BHG CGP RCA

Quebec Village in Summer signed lower left oil on canvas 19.5x23 in. (49.5x58.4 cm.)

Provenance Private collection, Ottawa

Randolph Hewton was a student of the iconic teacher William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal, who’s influence in shaping Canadian art was profound. While not an Impressionist painter himself, Brymner encouraged experimentation and individuality in his students, a trait key to his skill as a teacher. Hewton, winning the Wood Scholarship, also trained in Paris at the AcadÊmie Julian, meeting A.Y. Jackson there in 1912. They would both enlist in the army in 1915, Jackson serving in the 60th Battalion and Hewton in the 24th. Notably, Hewton was awarded the Military Cross in 1918, for gallantry at the Battle of Somme, a horrific chapter in WWI wherein 1.2 million men were either killed or wounded. Upon his return to Canada he showed with Jackson, and through this came to associate with the members of the Group of Seven, who invited to show with them in 1920. He also would play a critical role in the formation of the Beaver Hall Group that same year. After the Group of Seven disbanded, Hewton became a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters.

This sun-drenched scene shows a Quebec village on hill, church at the centre and a street flowing below. With its brilliant colour, attention to light and atmosphere, and staccato brushwork, the work is likely to be an early one, as it shows the influence of his time in Paris, and his studies under Brymner.

David B. Milne

(1882-1953) CGP CSGA CSPWC

City on the Hudson New York, c. 1913 signed lower right watercolour and gouache on illustration board 16.75x14.875 in (42.6x37.8 cm) Provenance Estate of David Milne; Private collection Exhibited Possibly: Art Association of Montreal, 1924, 44 as The City on gallery list; Possibly: Arts Club, Montreal, 1924;

The time he spent in New York was a critically important phase in the early development of artist David Milne. He left Paisley, Ontario in 1903, gravitating to New York in search of education, experience, and exposure to art. He was there when The Ash Can School held their first independent exhibition, read Emerson and Whitman, and soaked it all in. From 1910 – 1912 he focused on atmospheric effects in his work, painting in an Impressionist manner. He had seen an exhibition of Cézanne’s watercolours at the Stieglitz Gallery in 1911 – the first North American showing of the artist’s work. Milne instantly began down a new path, using colour to define spaces, using separate colours to describe shapes, and most importantly, using negative space to define the whole. In 1913, as we see in this work, he turned his attention to structure and form. Milne was, throughout his life, an incredibly driven painter. He would pursue his ideas relentlessly, exploring them multiple times until he had completely devoured their possibilities. The Armory Show, which he saw the year this work was painted, must have been a revelation. Over 2,000 works of art were on view, everything from van Gogh to Raoul Dufy, who, as a fauvist painter using eclectic colour, would certainly have interested Milne. City on the Hudson exemplifies his New York years not only by its subject, but in its Celanese treatment of structure, and the role played by the negative spaces in the work.

George Pepper (1877-1917) OSA Along the Ottawa, 1927 signed and dated ‘27 lower left oil on board 10.25x13.5 in. (26x34.3 cm.)

Provenance Private collection

George Pepper is known as an official WWII War Memorial artist, but this charming scene comes from a much earlier period in his career, when he was associated with the members of the Group of Seven, and student of J.E.H. MacDonald and J.W. Beatty. He would have the opportunity, through these connections, to sketch with members of the Group regularly, bringing his work to their attention and garnering enough praise to be invited to participate in their 1926 and 1928 shows.

Pepper’s work Along the Ottawa, even at this early date of 1927, has a very modern feel. With clean, even brushwork, and a simply composed scene, the influence of Carl Schaefer (with whom he also worked) and interest in printmaking can be seen. Pepper often employ a flat depth of field wherein individual elements of the work are outlined and neatly divided.

POST-WAR & CONTEMPORARY

Sybil Andrews

(1898-1992)

Water Jump titled, editioned and signed upper left coloured linocut, ed. 14 of 60 12.5x8 in. (31.7x20.3 cm. ) Provenance Private collection, Calgary In Water Jump, Sybil Andrews shows us her mastery of the use of negative space. The white horse, the main subject of the composition, is composed using an outline of black, with an interior shadow of pale cobalt blue, and a foreleg accented by spectrum red. It is a masterful print, the water is finely handled, and the passage wherein the lead horse’s tail, fits perfectly under the next horse’s chin is Andrews at her best.

Andrews explored several horse-related sporting subjects in her prints: In Full Cry, Racing, and Steeplechasing, show us a hunt and two types of racing. Michaelmas, Mangolds, Tillers of the Soil, Days’ End, and The Timber Jim, explore the horse at work.

Léon Bellefleur (1910-2007) AANFM CAS PY QMG Nostalgie, 1962 signed and dated ‘62 lower right oil on canvas 13.5x10.75 in. (34.3x27.2 cm.)

Provenance Private collection, Calgary

Following the lead of the Automatistes, and partly in reaction to it, the group Prisme d’Yeux, under the leadership of Alfred Pellan, published a manifesto calling for freedom of expression in 1948. Bellefleur was a signatory. Prisme d’Yeux was interested in art that responded to ideas held in the subconscious, and Bellefleur’s experience as an elementary school teacher (for 25 years), combined with his interest in Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, would have resonated with this. Bellefleur’s works are often centered in the trappings of childhood: play, games, spontaneity, and naïve creativity. He was experimental, interested in the act of art making, the response of creative individual to paper, paint and canvas, and sensitive especially to surface, texture and composition. His works often have a centrally focused theme, wherein paint builds and moves out from the centre of the work, sometimes with a sense of purpose, in other works, as pure paint on canvas. He said, “When I step in from of my canvas, I have nothing prepared. I am naked: I am completely free. I don’t have a subject in mind, nor a title, not even a colour scheme. Nothing.”

Molly Joan Lamb Bobak (1922-2014) BCSFA CGP CPE CSGA CSPWC RCA Event in Ottawa (2) signed lower right oil on canvas board 6x12 in. (15.2x30.5 cm.)

Provenance Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal; Private collection, Montreal; Sale of Waddington’s, Canadian Fine Art, Nov. 19, 2018, lot 126 Private collection

Molly Bobak lived her life surrounded by art and creativity. The daughter of art critic Harold Mortimer-Lamb, she was introduced to many Canadian artists - and would have been aware of their subjects and stylistic approach. It is perhaps because of this that she developed a style all her own, focusing on crowd scenes that are a play a movement, colour, and life. Bobak captures sundrenched beach scenes with blankets and tanned bodies, street scenes with rushing crowds loaded with packages and bundles, crowds skating, crowds racing, crowds sailing. She is lauded for her depictions of the celebrations that marked the end of the second World War, she was sent to England as an Official War Memorials artist – the first Canadian woman in the War Memorials program, creating over 400 works from V-E Day on.

This brilliant work by Bobak is especially resonant today, as we distance ourselves from our fellow humans, all caught in the grip of a world pandemic. Bobak’s people interact, they move shoulder to shoulder, lean head to head in pairs and larger grows, bustling through the scene, a hurry blurry of movement and life.

Molly Joan Lamb Bobak (1922-2014) BCSFA CGP CPE CSGA CSPWC RCA July 1st, Fredericton signed lower right signed and titled to verso oil on canvas board 7x11 in. (17.8x27.9 cm.)

Provenance Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal; Masters Gallery Ltd., Vancouver; Private collection, Toronto; Sale of Waddington’s, Canadian Fine Art, Nov. 19, 2018, lot 131; Private collection

In the 1960s, Molly and Bruno Bobak moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick with their two children. Her interest in scenes of celebrations, public events and city life had continued since her return from England where she has served as Canada’s first female War Memorials artist, and where she had met fellow artist Bruno. They had lived in Vancouver for many years, where she had taught at the Vancouver School of Art. It was a teaching post at the University of New Brunswick, that took her to Fredericton. There, she explored her new city, embracing its streets, parks, squares and public spaces, pubs, and stadiums, where she would find her favourite subject: people gathering. Her depiction of the Canada Day Parade is a delight. Brightly painted uniforms of the various participants divide the crowd into colour groups, and these are surrounded by onlookers, who are further surrounded by trees and buildings. The flags, carried at the centre of the scene, add further colour. Bobak’s brushwork is consistent throughout the crowd, with assured, vertical strokes angled to underscore directional movement, a feature that gives them a feeling of energy. The whole scene, especially the people, seem abuzz with movement.

Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960) RCA Patte de Velours, 1955 signed and dated ‘55 lower right oil on canvas 36x30 in. (91.4x76.2 cm.)

Provenance Acquired directly from the artist’s studio by G. Blair Laing, May 15, 1958, Paris; Private collection, Toronto; Sale of Heffel Fine Art, Fine Canadian Art, Nov. 24, 2005; Private collection Literature Francois Marc-Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas, 1978, listed p. 445

Paul-Émile Borduas was one of the most important figures in Canadian modern art. He began to experiment with Surrealism in the early 1940s, creating non-representational works in gouache. His first exhibition of them in 1942 was well-received. As his interest in pure painterly abstraction grew, he gathered a group of like-minded fellow artists around him including, amoung others, Jean Paul Riopelle, Marcel Barbeau, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Marcelle Ferron, and dancer Françoise Sullivan. Together, they began the Automatiste movement with Borduas as their leader and the driving author behind their 1948 manifesto. Borduas’s desire to separate church from state, especially in the arts, was highly politicized and cost him his job as a teacher. He was widely denounced and ostracized within his community. However, the spark had been lit, and the Automatistes Refus Global marked the dawn of the Quiet Revolution.

In 1953, Borduas moved to New York, where he saw the works of Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Pollock in particular resonated with him, and he started to execute his own works with a palette knife instead of a brush. By 1954, he was represented in the Venice Biennale. The following year, the year Patte de Velours was painted, he showed at the prestigious Bienale de São Paulo.

Patte de Velours, which translates to Velvet Paws, is a lovely title for a beautiful work. Borduas’s skill with white, and his liberal use of it, gives his works a refined, luxurious quality. A pure, reactive, instinctive abstraction, Patte de Velours is about movement, colour and liberation, as seems to embody a passage from the Refus Global, wherein the painting is “freed from useless chains, ...realize[s] a plenitude of individual gifts, ...unpredictability, spontaneity and resplendent anarchy.”

Borduas had moved to Paris by the year this work was painted, a time when he was very interest in the ideas of light and space. His works from this time are highly sought, their sense of airy spaciousness seems to incline viewers to lean in, take a deep breath and gaze.

Joe Fafard

(1942-2019)

Eclipse bronze, ed. 6 of 7 40x33x17 in. (101.6x83.8x43 cm.)

Provenance Douglas Udell Gallery, Edmonton; Private collection

“Does a work become more powerful with an increase in size? Less intimate? Is a sculpture sensed with different part of our body depending on its size?” Joe Fafard asked this critical question of himself in 2002, in his notes on the work Valentina. “It seems so,” he concluded, “ The small objects are more private less shared with other. There is a “close to the face” feeling, a handheld sensation somewhat like the private silent reading of a book. It feels precious and isolated...”1

The preciousness and intimacy of Joe Fafard’s smaller works allows us to take them into our spaces in a way that the large works, especially the scale works, do not. These small edition bronzes create that sense of intimacy instantly upon encountering them. With their character, their swagger, and their playfully manipulated forms, Fafard allows us not only to bring them closer to our faces, but to see them as we might see their larger compatriots, foreshortened by distance and with a playful and quirky field of view. Their lifelike essence and the fact that they are presented to us with the clear stamp of Fafard’s aesthetic adds to their undeniable presence.

1 Heath, Terrence. Joe Fafard. Douglas & McIntyre. 2007, p. 185

Joe Fafard

(1942-2019) Albert and Victoria, 1988 bronze, ed. 2 of 5 32x12x16 in. (81.3x30.5x40.6 cm.)

Provenance Douglas Udell Gallery, Edmonton; Private collection

Albert and Victoria is not only a fine example of Joe Fafard’s small works in bronze, it is also lovely play on words, and perhaps a bit of an inside joke. Are Albert and Victoria poking fun at Queen Victoria? She as the doting mother, and young Albert as her son, the second of Victoria’s nine children. This is the delight of Joe Fafard, his touches of humour and whimsy add a further layer of appeal to his works. Not only are they refined and genre-pushing, but they can make us smile, and sometimes laugh out loud, such was his ability to add, in addition to his multiple layers of rich patina, layers of hidden meaning.

Joe Fafard

(1942-2019) Down By The Old Mill Stream, 1990 bronze table, ed. 2 of 5 45x24x15 in. (114.3x60.9x38.1 cm.)

Provenance Douglas Udell Gallery, Edmonton; Private collection

Joe Fafard’s bronze furniture pieces combined elements of functional furniture with pure sculpture, bringing the gap between form and function. Here, in Down By The Old Mill Stream, he has left little room for function. The table top, instead of a surface upon which to place one’s car keys, becomes a pool of water in which two dapple-grey horses quench their thirst. Water drips from the convex bottom of the table, furthering the idea. Fafard really gilds the lily by using gumboots, the de rigueur footwear of the farm, not only as the feet of the table, but to form the braces between the legs.

Marcelle Ferron

(1924-2001) AANFM AUTO CAS QMG RCA SAAVQ SAPQ

Sans Titre, 1961 oil on canvas 28x24 in. (71x60.9 cm.)

Provenance Waddington & Gorce Inc., Montreal Galerie Simon Blais, Montreal Private collection

Marcelle Ferron was a trailblazer. An activist, outspoken and driven, she believed in the powerful language of colour and felt that it made universal connections where other aspects of art might not. Her paintings are strictly pictorial in their language, abstraction for her was about materials, space, and colour. Her interest in pure, rich colour took her to France in 1953, where she began to use white heavily, and to thicken her surface with layered-on paint manipulated with a palette knife in multi-directional strokes. She was careful not to overpower her whites with too much colour, allowing them to offset rather than overpower the white. She had the great fortune of being given a quantity of dry pigment by a paint manufacturer in Paris that she reground and mixed with either linseed, castor, or poppy oil to suit her needs. These pigments came in fifty pound bags, allowing her to increase the size of her works as well.

This untitled work from 1961 shows us her care in the preservation of white in her application of paint. While the knife is heavily loaded and many other colours appear, we still have passage of pure white, set off brilliantly against blue, purple, green and red.

Pierre Gauvreau

(1922-2011) AANFM AUTO CAS OC QMG Abstract Composition, 1957 mixed media on board 18x24 in. (45.7x60.9 cm.)

Provenance Gerard Gorce, Montreal; Private collection

Pierre Gauvreau was an early follower of Paul-Emile Borduas and a signatory to the Automatiste manifesto, being perhaps the most heavily influenced by surrealism of this group. His intense colours, unusual forms, and mixed media surfaces are at times fierce, always evocative, and often visually demanding. He took great joy in his work, and was a gentle and quiet man, a fact that seems a contrast to his vibrant, bold work. Gauvreau mixed his colours on the surface of his works, blending and working them into one another, then layering them up again. His work has a distinct feel, and Abstract Composition is fine example of his technique.

Lise Gervais

(1933-1998) QMG Le mur du son, 1962 signed and dated 62 lower left oil on canvas 36.25x36.25 in. (92x92 cm.)

Provenance Waddington & Gorce Inc., Montreal; Private collection, Toronto; Sale of Heffel Fine Art, November 27, 2014; Private collection

Lise Gervais was a follower of Les Automatistes, and would, for the duration of her career, remained committed to their traditions. Painting without reference to subject, frame, or form, she worked closely with Paul-Emile Borduas, painting thick, richly coloured works. Her paintings have a lyricism and lightness to them that belies their heavy-with-paint surfaces. Movement is often at play, as are ideas of weight and presence. An important teacher, she taught at Ecole des beaux-arts de Montreal, at Universite du Quebec at Montreal and at Concordia University. In 1983 and 1984, she was president of the Conseil des Artistes Peintres du Quebec. Le mur du son, or The Sound Barrier, is a dance of red, black, and yellow against pure white. Lively, almost frenetic, it is a vibrant work.

John Kasyn

(1928-2008) CSPWC OSA In the Late Afternoon Sun, Markham Street, Toronto oil on board 24x36 in. (60.9x91.4 cm.)

Provenance Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary; Ranger Oil, Calgary; Private collection

John Kasyn is a consistent painter of houses, street scenes, and buildings of Toronto. He pays great attention to detail, every windowsill, every doorstep, every fence line is painted with accuracy and care. He was especially fond of backyards and alleyways, the places where people spent more of their time, and where their true selves might be observed. He often chose buildings that were abandoned or potentially being torn down, capturing their character, grace, and charm for posterity. Always depicted in winter, Kasyn’s buildings are often bordered with leafless trees, black winter limbs against chalky, overcast skies. Summer trees, it seems, might obscure the view of the house. He painted this subject matter so frequently over course of his career that an architectural survey of old Toronto might be conducted using his work.

William Kurelek

(1927-1977) ARCA OC OSA Newfie Joke (A Boy Peeping Out From Behind a Snowball), 1974 signed and dated lower right mixed media on board 6x8.75 in. (15.2x22.2 cm) Provenance Private collection; Masters Gallery Ltd., Vancouver; Private collection

William Kurelek’s paintings of children at play are drawn on his own childhood memories, and his observations of the customs and traditions of other regions of Canada. Born in Alberta, raised in Manitoba, and later living Ontario, snow was a prominent feature in his life.

This close-in scene of a boy who has rolled a snowball too large to lift is a universal theme from the childhood of anyone who has, on a day after a heavy snowfall, rolled sticky, wet snow into a ball. The urge to keep going, until the ball has become too large to move, is a test many children put themselves to, turning, is most cases, from snowball making to snowman building as a solution.

In the distance in this work, Kurelek shows us groups of children pushing impossibly large balls of snow, perhaps images that come from the imaginings of the boy who peeps over the snowball nearest to us. His eyes are filled with impish concentration.

Mary Pratt

(1935-2018) CC OC RCA Orange on Tinfoil, 1993 signed and dated lower right signed and titled to verso oil on linen 18x24 in. (45.7x60.9 cm.)

Provenance Equinox Gallery, Vancouver; Sale of Heffel Fine Art, June 25, 2009; Madrona Gallery, Victoria; Private collection

Mary Pratt’s colour and high realism are well known aspects of her work. It is the joining of these two, combined with her way of framing each scene, that really causes her work to sing. Simple subjects: an overripe banana in a glass bowl, jars of jam made translucent by sun on a windowsill, and here, a slice of an orange, partially peeled and lying on a curl of tinfoil are made exquisite, rendered sacred, as if to belie their simplicity. They become objects of veneration, icons.

She described the colours she used in an article that was published in Canadian art upon her death in 2018: “Titanium White, Cadmium Pale Yellow or Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Orange, Permanent Rose, Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine Blue, and Permanent Deep Green.

I sometimes use Mauve, but only lately. I never use black except in watercolour; it takes the dance out of the painting, the dance that colour gives you. Instead, I mix up three dark colours.” In the background of Orange on Tinfoil, we have Ultramarine Blue mixed with Alizarin Crimson and white, a remarkable feat of painting, wherein a shadow, and the various reflections of it on tin foil play in dance of iridescence.

Mary Pratt’s work is subtle and nuanced, yet universal in its subjects. To say that they are simple denies her fastidious and complex understanding of them, her care in selecting, arranging, and painting them. Her ability to see beyond the hierarchy of subject matter and move past that with pure artistic skill was her first and foremost quest. Orange on Tinfoil is an extraordinary feat of painting, wherein he artist’s understanding of colour and composition, the play of light from orange, to table to tin foil, and the sense of stillness that permeates the work give us an orange as icon, a memento mori of the kitchen, a classical modernised still life.

Jean Paul Riopelle

(1923-2002) AUTO CAS OC QMG RCA SCA

À tue-tête, 1955-56 signed lower right signed to verso oil on canvas 13x16 in. (41.2x33 cm.)

Provenance Galerie Jacques Dubourg, Paris Sale of Heffel Fine Art, February 8, 2007 as Untitled; Private collection Exhibited Riopelle, Oeuvres récentes, Galerie Jacques Dubourg, Paris, 1956, cat. no. 22; Riopelle: An Exhibition of Works from Private Calgary Collections, Masters Gallery, Calgary, 2009; Riopelle: The Glory of Abstraction, Glenbow Museum, Calgary, 2010 Literature Catalogue raisonné de Jean Paul Riopelle, vol. II, 1954-1959, updated 2012

This stunning small canvas dates to the most renowned period in Jean Paul Riopelle’s oeuvre, the Mosaics of the 1950s. In these works, both large and small, as we have here, finely, and carefully applied knife-loads of paint are laid on in juxtaposition to one another: radiating, arcing, tripping, and dancing their way over his canvases. They are joyous, exuberant, vibrant, and electrifying to encounter.

Riopelle is well known in Canada as a key figure in the Refus Global, the 1948 Automatiste manifesto that denounced the control of the Catholic Church and provincial ideas and their controlling force of many aspects of life in Quebec. They advocated for a new collective hope, based on acts of passion, a break with conservative society, and through painting, dance, music, and theatre, sought to push the intellectual and creative potential of Quebec society to new heights. Riopelle’s fame extends to a wide international audience, and continues to grow as Canadian art plays a greater role in the International art world.

An artist from childhood, Riopelle began experimenting with non-representational painting in the 1940s. He was a student of Paul-Émile Borduas, and together with the other artists of Les Automatistes, held shared interests in Surrealism, in particular the writings of André Breton. Riopelle’s decision to abandon the paint brush, came soon after reading Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, and took him quickly into a period of Lyrical Abstraction, in which he was freed from composition and form, and interested purely in the act of painting. Famously, he would hold a handful of open tubes of paint in a fist like a bouquet of flowers, slice the shoulders of the tubes off all at once off to create larger openings, then work by squeezing paint freely onto a palette knife, painting knife, spatula, or trowel. Swathes of liquid colour were then swiped onto the canvas with instinctive strokes. Further, he would use matte as well as gloss, and semi-gloss paints in the same works, so that when they are properly lit, their surfaces dance with varying degrees of reflected light. This is particularity notable in his Mosaic series, of which À tue-tête, is a fine example.

Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002) AUTO CAS OC QMG RCA SCA Sans Titre, 1958 oil on paper on linen 17.5x22 in. (44.5x55.9 cm.)

Provenance Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montreal; Galerie Valentin, Montreal; Private collection

In the late 1950s Jean Paul Riopelle was experimenting with oil on paper, and by the 1960s, and had diversified his media. While Riopelle remained faithful to the Automatiste tenets throughout his life, these works have more structure, and not strictly spontaneous. Elements of collage too, would come into his work in a few years, and this work hints at what was to come in the area of white, which has been applied over darkened lines, yet allows them to show through. This work is gestural, agitated and deeply intense, its dark, greyed tones have been mixed directly on the work in places, and applied raggedly, with licks and tendrils of paint that are indicative of the speed at which they were applied.

Jean Paul Riopelle

(1923-2002) AUTO CAS OC QMG RCA SCA

Graine d’Original, 1974 signed lower right titled on stretcher bar to verso oil on canvas 10.75x18.125 in. (27.3x46 cm.)

Provenance Galerie Maeght, Paris; Dominion Gallery, Montreal; Private collection

Graine d’Original, or Original Seed, the title of this later canvas implies, is a return to Riopelle’s early 1950s methods. Paint is thickly applied, laid on with a long, narrow palette knife, and is juicily built up, with stacked up layers, and tactile licks of impasto. What places this work squarely in the 1970s is the sense of a structured composition, with a square shape on the left and a squared and curved shape on the right, it implies intent. The division of his colours into distinct regions also indicate that this is a latter work.

Riopelle had returned to Quebec by the time Graine d’Original was painted, and had taken on a number of large public commissions, diversified his media to include collage, lithography, watercolour, ink on paper, and sculpture. This pure, palette knife work is a bridge between the heady works of the Refus Global years, and Riopelle’s mature expressions.

INTERNATIONAL POST-WAR

Marc Chagall (1887-1985)

Le peintre et son chevalet Executed in 1981 Signed and inscribed lower left: Pour Dr. Ch. Alfred en bon souvenir, Marc Chagall Dated lower right: 1981 China ink, gouache, watercolor, and crayons on paper 17.5x 11.375 in. (44.5 x 29 cm) Provenance Dr. Charles Alfred, Paris (a gift from the artist) Galerie Adler, Paris Private collection, Geneva A.K. Prakash, Toronto Private collection Exhibited Osaka, Takashimaya Art Gallery, Marc Chagall, 8 – 20 March 2012. Kyoto, Takashimaya Art Gallery, 27 – 16 April 2012; Yokohama, Takashimaya Art Gallery, 25 April – 7 May 2012; Tokyo, Takashimaya Art Gallery, 7 – 25 June 2012; Okayama, Prefectural Museum, 13 July– 26 August 2012; and Gifu, Prefectural Museum, 5 September – 28 October 2012.

Literature Marc Chagall, Takashimaya Art Gallery, Osaka, 2012, no. 36, reproduced p.53 Marc Chagall, Prefectural Museum, Okayama, 2012, no.37, reproduced p.63

Marc Chagall’s pioneering modernism broached many artistic styles. He worked in painting and drawing, as well as book illustration, ceramics and fibre arts, printmaking, and the design of stage sets. His works in stained glass are found all over the world, from the Art Institute of Chicago and the United Nationals Headquarters in New York, to the cathedrals of Riems and Metz, to the ceiling of the Paris Opera and the Jerusalem Windows of the Hadassah Medical Center’s Ein Kerem campus in Israel.

In the latter part of his life, Chagall was living on the Côte d’Azur, near Saint-Paul-de-Vence, then an artistic centre in Europe. Picasso was there at the same time, and said of him, “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color is... His canvases are really painted, not just tossed together. Some of the last things he’s done in Vence convince me that there’s never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has.”

This feeling for light was honed by his work in stained glass, which, like no other artistic medium, employs light as an active participant in delivering colour to our eye.

Chagall was the last surviving European modernist master, his long and prolific career spanned two world wars and the Russian Revolution. He was a central figure in the golden age of European Modernism, and influenced generations of painters with his surreal, dream-like subjects, his explorations of myth, storytelling, and fantasy, and his love of brilliant colour.

In Le peintre et son chevalet, we see Chagall (we assume) seated in front of a portrait, set presumably in his studio. Motifs common to his larger body of work appear: the cherubs, flying animals, musical instruments, the moon. Chagall’s distinct hand can be seen in the passages of this work that are executed in ink, his light touch, his swirled mark making, and assured crosshatching. He paints a woman in a red dress, seated, hands folded into her lap, flowers at her shoulder. She and the flowers are the main focus of Chagall’s attention to colour in this work, and she is surrounded by white, setting her off from the rest of the image. Thus we have a portrait within a portrait, a fine late career example of Chagall’s multifaceted work.

This work, like others in Chagall’s body of work, is inscribed as “en bon souvenir” and gifted to Dr. Charles Alfred, Chagall’s personal doctor and a well-loved member of the community.

CONTACT

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We thank Lisa Christensen for providing the accompanying essays for the works in this catalogue.