Additional Images

Provenance:

Acquired directly from the artist by the father of the current owner, 1970
By descent to the Collection of Dr. William and Fran Barnett, London, ON

Note:

A.Y. Jackson first visited Go Home Bay, on the eastern shore of Georgian Bay, in 1913. After moving into a crude shack on Portage Island, Jackson was visited by Toronto ophthalmologist Dr. James MacCallum. MacCallum, on the urging of Lawren Harris, invited Jackson to instead stay at his palatial cottage on Go Home Bay. MacCallum was a lover of Canadian art – as well as a dedicated patron to struggling artists. In addition to his invitation to stay with him, he extended Jackson the offer of a year’s financial support on the condition that he take a studio in the Studio Building in Toronto rather than leave for New York at the end of the summer season.

MacCallum had been in close contact with Harris through their mutual association with the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto, and had agreed to help financially back the construction of the Studio Building. Harris and Jackson had also connected for the first time a few months before MacCallum’s generous offer, with Harris having travelled to Berlin (present-day Kitchener), Ontario to meet with Jackson. Harris spoke of the need for a truly Canadian art movement, and wanted Jackson to join. Jackson, who instantly took a liking to Harris, was not immediately convinced, concerned as he was with the difficulties of supporting himself as a landscape painter of Canadian scenes in a city as expensive and indifferent to Canadian art as Toronto of the period. It was MacCallum’s offer of financial support in the fall of 1913 that tipped the balance and convinced Jackson to make his way to Toronto, a momentous move towards his role in the Group of Seven.

Jackson would return to Go Home Bay at least seven more times to sketch and paint. In his memoir, he wrote that “Go Home Bay and the outer islands are filled for me with happy memories of good friends and of efforts, more or less successful, that I made to portray its ever-varying moods.”[1] He elaborated further, writing that “there were many places to go within an hour – much infinite variety, lagoons with water lilies and pickerel weeds, smooth rocks worn into fantastic shapes by glacial actions, pine trees clinging to the rocks and bent into strange forms by the prevailing west winds. Every wind brought its change of colour, – the North wind with everything sharply defined and the distant islands lifted above the horizon by mirage; the South wind, – the blue giving way to greys and browns and the water rushing over the shoals; and the West wind best of all, – sparkling and full of movement.”[2]

MacCallum’s cottage on Go Home Bay would provide a basecamp not only for Jackson but for other members of the Group to make paintings which would become some of the most familiar in Canadian art, including F.H. Varley’s Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay (National Gallery of Canada, Accession number 1814) and Arthur Lismer’s A September Gale, Georgian Bay (National Gallery of Canada, Accession number 3360).

[1] A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1967), 76.
[2] A.Y. Jackson, foreword to Percy J. Robinson, The Georgian Bay (Toronto: privately printed, 1966), 3.