Literature:

Literature: Joan Murray, “Northern Lights: Masterpieces of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven”, Toronto, 1997, page 34, reproduced.

Note:

Painted circa 1910.

In his wide-ranging contribution to Canadian art, Challener included many memorable mural paintings as well as striking genre paintings, often portrayals of childhood and women, landscapes, still-lifes and portraits, all painted with a perceptive attitude toward composition and subject. A member of a number of clubs devoted to drawing, and to the creation of congenial groups of mutually supportive artists, such as the Toronto Art Students' League (1888-1904) and its successor The Mahlstick Club (1904-08), the Graphic Arts Club and the Arts and Letters Club, Toronto, of which he was a founder, he provided the Group of Seven with an example of an artist who enjoyed working in the open to record the effects of light and atmosphere. His commercial work also reveals his solid knowledge of draughtsmanship and the figure.

There is a curious ambiguity about Challener's beautifully painted “Red Cross Knight”. You can see it as a straightforward portrait of the subject, a knight "in shining armour," complete to the appropriate armour and trappings on the horse. But there is also something subtly humorous about the way Challener represented the knight firmly planting his lance point down, with an elaborate penant on the other end, in front of a giant red cross. The patient look to the horse adds a delicate expressive balance to the sense of romance and Challener doesn't let the balance tip the wrong way.

So this painting isn't really about the time when knighthood was in flower; it's about the way artists allude to the past and put it into the context of the present. Challener's considerable virtue was to create effects which are both meditative and full of the mood of the period. His “Red Cross Knight” brilliantly does what art does best: open the eyes of the viewer to the power of the creative imagination in action.

We would like to thank art historian, Joan Murray, for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.