Additional Images

Provenance:

Estate of H.E. Banting, Toronto

Note:

Sir Frederick Banting (1891-1941) was a Canadian medical scientist, doctor, Nobel Laureate and a respected Canadian landscape painter.

Banting was a senior surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. In the autumn of 1921, he discovered insulin with co-worker Dr. Charles Best for which they received the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Banting developed an interest in painting around 1920 and in particular after purchasing a war sketch from A.Y. Jackson at the artist’s Toronto studio. They soon became friends and in 1927 Banting made his first sketching trip with Jackson along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. Later that year they went on to the Arctic where they sketched on birch panels.

Together they enjoyed several other sketching trips during which Jackson would guide Banting’s progress as a painter. Jackson’s influence and success as a teacher can be seen in Mountain Range through the long, steady brush strokes and colour palette.

Banting, who was knighted in 1934, had hoped to retire from medical research at the age of 50 to devote himself to his painting but he died tragically in a plane crash during the Second World War en route to England.