Lot 92
ALEXANDER YOUNG JACKSON, O.S.A., R.C.A.
Additional Images
Provenance:
Watson Art Galleries, Montreal
Estate of Theodosia Dawes Bond Thornton, Montreal
Private Collection, Ontario
Literature:
Naomi Jackson Groves, A.Y.’s Canada, Toronto/Vancouver, 1968, page 76 and plate 37 for a closely related drawing, reproduced.
Note:
Charlevoix County provided a feast of quaint subjects for A.Y. Jackson including picturesque thatched-roof barns, the inevitable extinction of which was of great concern to the artist. Groves writes: ”A.Y.’s lifelong attachment to barns is so self-evident as seemingly to require little comment... Yet he did not like all barns, not by any means. Not even any old barn. There has to be something special about each barn he honours with permanency in his work.”
Jackson bestows dignity on the old barn depicted in this lot. The barn and the land that surrounds it are a checklist of traits valued by Jackson: the gently contoured land into which the barn has settled, the furrows and snowdrifts that frame it, the slight hump in the roofline, the silvered and rusty red shingles. These were the artist’s quarry, essential ingredients for a successful picture and therefore highly prized by him.