Additional Images

Provenance:

Masters Gallery, Calgary, AB
Private Collection, Calgary, AB

Note:

Walter Joseph Phillips was influenced early in his career by the strong tradition of British watercolour – particularly the work of J.M.W. Turner and David Cox. Curator and art historian Nancy E. Green notes that “For Phillips, there were probably several reasons for concentrating his efforts in watercolor rather than in oil. Comparative cost of materials would surely have been a factor, but Phillips also seemed to express himself naturally in watercolor [...] He also liked the immediacy and spontaneity of watercolor, and he reveled in sketching trips, where he was able to combine acute observation of nature with a talent for translating that beauty directly to his viewers.”[1]

Unlike the wild, untamed landscapes of the Group of Seven, Phillips’ work maintained the strong influence of the English picturesque throughout his life. "Beauty was Phillips' touchstone," note art historians Maria Tippett and Douglas Cole, "It could be found throughout nature, and he sometimes wrote of art as little more than a way of bringing natural beauty home, of making it domestic and permanent.... He wrote of his encounters with nature with some of the sophistication of a botanist, zoologist, and geologist, and with all the sensitivity of an aesthete."[2]

Nowhere was this natural beauty more evident for Phillips than Lake of the Woods, in Northern Ontario, which would serve as his prime subject from 1914-1924, across varied media.[3] Curator Sophie Lavoie writes that Lake of the Woods inspired his greatest production, “including eleven etchings, forty woodblocks, five engravings, and innumerable watercolours.”[4] Phillips was known to reuse passages of various artworks that he found pleasing, and indeed, the present watercolour, “Norman Bay, Lake of the Woods,” shares a near-identical cloud formation with the seminal woodcut of the same name, “Norman Bay, Lake of the Woods” (1920), an example of which is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.[5] Per Lavoie, It was a common practice for Phillips to develop a woodcut design from a watercolour.[6]

It is no accident that cloud and sky were the focus of Phillips’ keen eye, for he regarded them as essential to the making of a successful image. In his own words:

“Clouds are, perhaps, of all the forms of nature, the most important to the landscape painter. Their variety in shape and character makes them adaptable in design, and in definite fixture to the expression of every mood from violence to tranquility. The sky is the great reservoir of light; light is the whole of beauty. A clear sky is a monotonous affair, a mere void; clouds enliven it, they temper its brilliance; they embroider upon the field of blue ever-changing patterns in white and gold and grey. The painter who systematically neglects or scamps his skies works under a heavy handicap. He confines his attention to things near at hand: he keeps his feet upon the ground, and knows nothing of the exaltation of the spirit arising from the contemplation of infinite space. When I see a young artist who regards the clouds carefully, I feel sure he will reap his reward in the genre of landscape.”[7]

[1] Nancy Green, Kate Rutherford, and Toni Tomlinson, Walter J. Phillips (Portland, OR: Pomegranate, 2013), 9.
[2] Quoted in ibid, 9.
[3] Phillips, quoted in Duncan Campbell Scott, Walter J. Phillips (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1947), 28.
[4] Sophie Lavoie, “NORMAN BAY, LAKE OF THE WOODS, 1916,” https://www.waddingtons.ca/auction/the-canada-auction-jun-09-2022/gallery/lot/2/
[5] Please see https://wjphillips.ca/artwork/norman-bay-lake-of-the-woods/ and https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artwork/norman-bay-lake-of-the-woods
[6] Lavoie.
[7] Phillips, quoted in Scott, 32-33.