Additional Images

Provenance:

Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal, QC;
Sam Borenstein, Montreal, QC;
Kastel Gallery, Westmount, QC;
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Literature:

A Retrospective Exhibition Goodridge Roberts une exposition rétrospective (exh. cat.) (Ottawa, ON: National Gallery of Canada, 1969), p. 150, no. 137, RI 1048

Exhibited:

A Retrospective Exhibition: Goodridge Roberts, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, QC; Confederation Art Gallery and Museum, Charlottetown, PE; Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, ON; Musée du Québec, Quebec City, QC; London Public Library and Art Museum, London, ON; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Aug 1969-Apr 1970, no. 137

Note:

Exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, this painting exemplifies the artist’s later work, which is characterised by loose, quickly executed and expressionistic brushstrokes, in contrast to the more muted colours of earlier years.

Unlike the Group of Seven, Roberts eschewed the deep wilderness or desire for great exploration, preferring to use tamer, near-pastoral landscapes as his subject. He completed his works on location or not at all. Roberts was deeply concerned with the act of painting itself, and what he termed his ‘response.’ He would reuse locations that he felt evoked this response, noting “I would go there and say too bad I have to use these same things time after time, but it’s better to use them than to paint something that fails to bring forth any response in me.” Roberts made a startlingly similar painting to the one on offer here, “Lake in Eastern Townships,” 1962, which was shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1981 in the exhibition “Goodridge Roberts: Paintings from the 1950s and 60s” and reproduced in the accompanying catalogue.

The catalogue text notes that Roberts’ paintings “are not solely pictorial range representations, or mementoes of a particular place and time but rather a record of Roberts' ability to create a picture that satisfied his requirements for structural unity and over-all harmony. What he seeks to portray, however, is not an architectonic but an elemental, natural order. Roberts' landscapes are completely unified and their effect is one of wholeness rather than particularization. They project a feeling of being in nature rather than standing apart from it. The details of individual rocks, trees and flowers become apparent only after the painting has been perceived in its entirety.” [1]

[1] Goodridge Roberts: Paintings from the 1950s and 60s. Exhibition catalogue. (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1980), 11.