Additional Images

Provenance:

La Maison des Encans, Montreal, QC, 23 Feb 2011, lot 59;
Private Collection, Montreal, QC

Note:

To those outside of Atlantic Canada, Mabel Killam Day (1884-1960) may be a remarkable discovery. Born and raised in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, she was a student of John Hammond (see lot 13 in this auction) at the Mount Allison Ladies’ College in Sackville, New Brunswick in her late teens. Later she went to New York where she studied under Robert Henri and moved in the orbit of extraordinary modern American painters Edward Hopper and George Bellows. She returned to Nova Scotia after she finished her studies and began to paint seascapes. In 1910 she married Frank Parker Day, and they left Canada for Pittsburgh two years later, not to permanently return to Canada until 1933.

Untitled (Winter Landscape), was likely painted in the middle 1930s after her return to Nova Scotia. Her work done two decades earlier has the verve of youth, and emulation of Henri. With maturity came efficiency and insight, and her demonstrative strokes of paint yielded to thoughtful allocation and placement of colour. The facing side of the red house near the centre of this composition consists of multiple tints of red leavened with yellow, then offset by the complimentary green wall on the composition’s right side. The scene is bracketed by muted violet shadows on the walls of buildings at far left and right and the carefully complex modulations of the snow’s white at the bottom. With the clean portrayal of the far shore and crisp sky in the distance, Day’s maturity and focus becomes clear. Her works seldom appear at auction outside of the United States or Atlantic Canada, and Waddington’s is pleased to offer a work by her for the first time.