Additional Images

Provenance:

Canadian Fine Arts, Toronto, 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 Hilly Field (1913) features the stitching brushwork in a much brighter study. The compositional features recur in MacDonald’s later, Harvest Evening Moon, 1917, in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. The brilliance of the day is distinctively MacDonald’s. He portrays the play of light across the mown fields, sooks and horses pulling the wagon as light on diverse tangible surfaces, and the light of the blue sky and cirrus clouds on the intangible. This sensibility and these effects achieved their ultimate form in his early masterpiece Fair Weather, Georgian Bay, also 1913, in the Thomson Collection of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

[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.