Lot 90
JAMES EDWARD HERVEY MACDONALD, O.S.A., R.C.A.
Additional Images
Provenance:
Roberts Gallery Limited, Toronto
Private Collection, Ontario
Literature:
Bruce Whiteman, J.E.H. MacDonald, Quarry Press, Kingston, 1995, pages 23-24.
Note:
In 1899, J.E.H. MacDonald and his new bride Joan set up in a small house in the Toronto Junction. Just north of High Park, the house provided the painter with proximity to nature and a fitting spot in which to start a family (their son Thoreau was born in 1901). Returning to Grip Printing and Publishing Company as a senior artist in 1907, J.E.H. MacDonald met Tom Thomson and helped him to design and build a modest cottage at 475 Quebec Avenue near his own residence.
Executed in his urban wilderness in 1910, one might assume that this work was featured in MacDonald’s exhibition at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto that Bruce Whiteman deemed “...the high point of 1911.” The exhibition consisted of a series of oil sketches executed in High Park and along the Humber River. “These sketches embodied a nascent maturity and what C.W. Jeffreys, in a review of the exhibit, called... ‘a refreshing absence of Europe, or anything else, save Canada and J.E.H. MacDonald and what they have to say.’”
This sketch, in its darkened palette and atmospheric nature, demonstrates MacDonald’s ability to imbue the contained space of a public park with the full, unbridled power of the Canadian landscape.
For a gouache of this subject, see Lot 118.