Provenance:

The Art Emporium, Vancouver.
Private Collection, Toronto.

Literature:

Marjorie Lismer Bridges, “A Border of Beauty”, Toronto, 1977, pages 16-18.

Note:

Although documented by Arthur Lismer almost forty years before painting “Tree Stump, B.C. Forest”, the artist’s recorded first impressions of his inaugural trip to Algonquin Park (on a sketching trip with Tom Thomson) reveal Lismer’s “wonder and excitement” for the Canadian forest landscape and a love for the details he discovered within its depths, traits which remain a constant in the painter’s work throughout his career. Lismer’s description of the intricacies he discovered inside Algonquin Park point clearly to details which the artist has captured within “Tree Stump, B.C. Forest”.

“Everything was growing, growing, growing – everything had a song… There – a contrast in the depth of cedar grove, or pine and spruce bush – here – a merciless tangle of fallen trees and age-long struggle with the elements… Overhead, the heavy interlacing branches permit but little light to penetrate. Only here and there a shaft of light has caught the top of a rotting stump, and burns like a sacrificial fire in some huge primeval temple.”