Additional Images

Provenance:

Private collection, Ontario

Note:

Waddington’s is honoured to offer Edge of Town, Early Spring and its study, Sketch for Edge of Town, Early Spring by Peter Clapham Sheppard, as separate lots in this auction, and give the rare opportunity to view the relationship between sketch and canvas.

The pure pleasure of Edge of Town, Early Spring is rare in Canadian landscape painting of the first half of the twentieth century. Sheppard’s major landscape compositions provide more of this pleasure for two key reasons. One is that his paintings show people in their environments engaged with each other being human and humane. The other is his palette, particularly his use of white to leaven the chroma and give his paintings their distinct luminosity.

The practice of making field studies had been common since the early nineteenth century in England and France, and Sheppard used it to his own ends as much to establish compositions and colour as to experiment. Sketch for Edge of Town, Early Spring establishes the artist’s and our vantage atop a hill looking across a valley to the edge of a town with bands of rain in the distance. With chrome yellow, ultramarine, purple madder, and white, Sheppard had all he needed to capture the landscape. As with Tom Thomson’s sketches on panel, Sheppard’s intentionally restricted palette gives the sketch an inherent harmony. The multiple tints between yellow, green and puce are all the product of his careful blending on-site and in the moment.

From Sheppard’s first observation to first touches of paint on the panel, the distant rains add to the composition’s psychological atmosphere. It evokes country air, cut hay in the late summer, and builds an emotional connection to the scene. When he worked up the sketch into the canvas, the structure of the composition and the palette remained remarkably consistent. At full exhibition size, Sheppard’s point of view is fully realised. The bird’s eye perspective of Edge of Town, Early Spring is singular in his œuvre. Sheppard’s elevated perspective elevates our spirit as we see people on the land engaged with it and each other, humane and luminous.