Additional Images

Provenance:

James Montrose Duncan Olmsted, Toronto, ON, then Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.;
By descent to his wife Evangeline Harris Olmsted, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.;
Sotheby's, Toronto, ON, 12 May 1987, lot 185;
Private Collection, London, ON

Exhibited:

Canadian Paintings, San Francisco Museum of Art, 2-14 Jul 1942, no. 8

Note:

This charming sketch of Saint Jean Port Joli, Quebec (March 1927) is from a key moment in Frederick Banting’s painting career. By 1927 he had been painting for a few years, and that March he took his first plein-air sketching trip with his friend A.Y. Jackson to the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, down from Quebec City.

In his primary career, as a physiologist at the University of Toronto, he worked with the painting’s first owner, James Montrose Duncan Olmsted (1886-1956), who also worked on the development of insulin and was an Associate Professor of Physiology. The American-born Olmsted worked in Toronto from 1920 until 1927 when he became the Head of the Department of Physiology at the University of California, Berkeley.[1] Possibly a gift from Banting to Olmsted upon Olmsted’s departure for Berkeley, or in honour of Olmsted’s marriage to Evangeline Harris in 1927, the painting remained in the Olmsted family until shortly after Evangeline’s death in 1983 when it was acquired by the family of the consignor.

Being out of the country for more than half of a century, Saint Jean Port Joli, Quebec was not included in the major memorial exhibitions following Banting’s death. However it was in a 1942 exhibition of contemporary Canadian paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Art where Jackson was singled out as the principal artist, and Banting as one of his disciples.[2]

On the market for only the second time in nearly a century, Banting’s confident rendering of the scene and direct use of whites, blues, and pinks to capture the changing effects of a harsh early spring, gives the image a punch distinct from the work of his friend. Banting’s first-time accomplishment en plein air is all the more special given Jackson’s recollection of Banting’s amazement with plein-air painters’ endurance: “And I thought this was a sissy game.”[3]

[1] Anonymous, “Toronto Professors Accept U.S. Posts.” The Globe (21 April 1927): 14.
[2] Alexander Fried, “Music and Art,” The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco) (12 July 1942: 35.
[3] A.Y. Jackson, Banting as an Artist (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1943): 12.