Additional Images

Provenance:

Roberts Gallery, Toronto, ON
Private Collection, Canada
Roberts Gallery, Toronto, ON
Dr. Franc R. Joubin, Toronto, ON
Heffel Gallery, Vancouver, BC
Waddington & Gorce, Inc., Montreal, QC
Galerie Dresdnere, Toronto, ON, as Sun After Rain, Madawaska Region - Algonquin Park
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Literature:

Pearl McCarthy, "A Meticulously Orderly Painter," The Globe and Mail (Toronto, ON), 14 Mar 1959, 15, repro. b/w.
Paul Duval, A.J. Casson (Toronto: Roberts Gallery, 1975), 131 repro. b/w.
Paul Duval, A.J. Casson / His Life & Works / A Tribute (Toronto: Cerebrus / Prentice-Hall, 1980), 227.
Eve Johnson, "Art of a living master," The Vancouver Sun (Vancouver, BC), 9 Dec 1985, 25.

Exhibited:

Recent Paintings by A. J. Casson R.C.A., O.S.A., Roberts Gallery, Toronto, ON, 6-21 Mar 1959.
A. J. Casson, Kenneth G. Heffel Fine Art Inc., Vancouver, BC, 7 Dec 1985-25 Jan 1986.

Note:

A.J. Casson retired in 1958 after a 45-year career in commercial art. During his commercial life he was respected for his perfectionism and his refined understanding of colour and linear design. In his new career as an artist, Casson pushed these effects to heights and achievements unparalleled by the Group of Seven and distinct in Canadian landscape painting with Sun After Rain.

Casson’s masterful control of his palette and chromatic values enabled him to convey the scene with stunning effect. As the rain moves from right to left across the valley to the hills in the distance, sunlight traces the edges of clouds with a brilliant white, slightly infused with pale blue. Casson obscures the sun behind the cloud and engages us with multiple light effects. The rocky crest of a hill picketed with trees in their summer foliage, establishes our point of view.

Directly above, a heavy, dark cloud refracts the light of the sun behind it. Below, the afternoon sky is still moist and Casson plays vaporous effects off the slopes of the distant hills. Each is slightly different according to distance, ambient light and temperature. Between the foreground and the hills, the expansive plain is divided by a meandering river. It announces the distance between our place in the foreground and the hills kilometres away.

Sun After Rain was reproduced in Pearl McCarthy’s review of Casson’s first solo exhibition at Roberts Gallery, Toronto, March 1959. Their relationship pre-dated that exhibition and continued until Casson’s death, with many solo and group exhibitions in between. In addition to his perfectionism and acute sense of design, Casson possessed an exemplary work ethic, embodying the dictum, “nulla dies sine linea” (never a day without line).