Additional Images

Provenance:

Joyner Canadian Art, Toronto, ON, 16 May 1990, lot 279;
Private collection, Burlington, ON, 1990;
By descent to private collection, December 2020

Note:

More than his many accomplishments, including his participation in the Canadian War Memorials Fund during the First World War, founding memberships in the Group of Seven (1920), the Beaver Hall Group (1920), and Canadian Group of Painters (1933), and his advocacy for his fellow artists, A.Y. Jackson’s most profound contribution to Canadian culture was changing how Canadians see their country. From east to west and from north to south Jackson painted the country in all seasons, creating images that have become synonymous with the places they depict, even if few Canadians have visited them.

Smart River, Alaska Highway is a brilliant example of this. It is both a sequel to his work with the Canadian War Memorials in 1917-1919 and a contribution to the depiction of the war effort on the domestic front during the Second World War. In October 1943, when he was 62 years old, he and Henry Glyde went up the Alaska Highway to do studies for the National Gallery of Canada. As the highway was still under military control, their movements were circumscribed, yet Jackson’s ability to see potential in the landscape was unimpeded.

This tempera on board composition of the Smart River on the Alaska Highway in far north-western British Columbia, a few kilometres south of the Yukon border, is the original artwork for the serigraph, River, Alaska Highway (Smart River), 1945-1948 published by Sampson-Matthews as part of the Federation of Canadian Artists program of democratising Canadian art by using a new form and distributing it broadly. It displays all of Jackson’s artistic powers. As with his paintings of southern Alberta of the period, in his maturity he understood that painting the deceptively vast distances requires different techniques. Here it is light. Zones of brilliant yellows, near black of silhouetted trees and neutral pale green for snow and ice move the viewer’s eyes into an amazing, silent space in the midst of global conflict.