Additional Images

Provenance:

Collection of Thoreau MacDonald, son of the artist, ON
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

J.E.H. MacDonald’s eloquent and sensitive approach to art transcends the man of the woods caricature sometimes given to members of the Group of Seven. The three pastoral scenes on offer span 1910 to around 1925, a period prior to MacDonald’s friendship with Lawren S. Harris to the moment of the Group’s greatest effect and most notable successes. Together, the scenes illuminate moments in MacDonald’s career.

The earliest, Hauling Wood at Hardy’s Farm, Oakwood, ON (1910), was painted the year before MacDonald’s 1911 solo exhibition of sketches at the Arts & Letters Club (Toronto) that brought him to Harris’s attention. In C.W. Jefferys’ review of the exhibition, he praised MacDonald’s sketches for their “refreshing absence of Europe, or anything else, save Canada,” and a way of painting that suits MacDonald’s subjects and his personality.[1] His composition of the wagon, cut wood and blossoming tree bathed in crepuscular light do not evoke the Old World. The detail of the wagon wheels and the ends of wood echo those in his Sketch for “Tracks and Traffic” sold by Waddington’s 24 November 2014, and his overlapping wet-in-wet painting of the grass uses MacDonald’s own version of the ‘Segantini stitch’ he employed at this time.

[1] C.W. Jefferys, “MacDonald’s Sketches,” The Lamps (Toronto, ON), vol. 1, no. 2 (December 1911), 12.

We thank Gregory Humeniuk, art historian, consultant and curator, for this essay.