Additional Images

Provenance:

Waddington's Auctioneers, Toronto, ON, 14 Jun 1984, lot 1031
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

A.Y. Jackson first visited Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories in 1928, on a riverboat trip with Dr. Frederick Grant Banting – inventor of insulin and a regular sketching companion of Jackson’s – and geologist Dr. James Macintosh Bell. At the time, the far north was, per Jackson, “a part of the country few Canadians at the time knew anything about”[1] and the resulting paintings broke new ground. Conditions were far from palatial – mosquitos were a constant menace – but Jackson was captivated by the rugged landscapes. Though he was anxious to return to the Northwest Territories, it would be a decade before that dream was realised.

In 1938, prospector Gilbert La Bine invited Jackson up to his mine at Eldorado, 400 kilometres north of Yellowknife, on the banks of Great Bear Lake. La Bine had discovered a radium deposit almost a decade earlier, and a small village known as Port Radium sprung up to service it. Jackson eagerly accepted the invitation, and after a few weeks spent painting in Georgian Bay was flown up to Eldorado. He spent six undisturbed weeks working in this remote part of the country where “everything that takes place does it over a thousand miles.”[2] Jackson enjoyed painting both the wilderness of the Barren Lands and the tiny town of Port Radium from a variety of vantage points.

Jackson would return to Port Radium in 1949, a trip he took after completing his final summer teaching at Banff. He was accompanied by geologist Maurice Haycock. The two would return the following year, and Jackson would visit again in 1951, in the company of mining employee John Rennie. By then, Port Radium had become home to roughly 200 people, as well as the Hudson Bay Company and RCMP outposts, a post office, a radio station and other government offices. Dennis Reid writes that Jackson’s "attention would be drawn increasingly to that extensive part of the country that neither contained the soil nor enjoyed the climate to sustain settled life, but that nonetheless drew hardy, adventurous men with its promise of hidden wealth.”[3]

We are pleased to offer two paintings from these later Eldorado trips in this auction: lot 26, Eldorado Mines, Great Bear Lake, 1950 and lot 27, Rock Form Eldorado Mines, September 1949.

[1] Wayne Larsen, A.Y. Jackson: The Life of the Landscape Painter (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2009), 334.
[2] Naomi Groves, A.Y.’s Canada (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, 1968), 208.
[3] Dennis Reid, Alberta Rhythm: The Later Work of A.Y. Jackson (exh. cat.) (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982), 13.