Additional Images

Provenance:

Acquired directly from the artist;
Lever Bros., Toronto, ON;
George Murray Bertram, Toronto, ON;
By descent Private Collection, Idaho, U.S.A.;
Waddington's Auctioneers, Toronto, ON, 27 May 2019, lot 62, as, Sun and Fog, Great Bear Lake

Literature:

A.Y. Jackson: Paintings 1902-1953 (exh. cat.) (Toronto, ON: Art Gallery of Toronto, 1953): p. 28, no. 66, as, Sunshine and Fog, Eldorado Mines, Great Bear Lake.
Anon., "Paintings by Jackson Cover 1902-53 Period," The Gazette (Montreal, QC) (30 January 1954), as, Sunshine and Fog, Eldorado Mines, Great Bear Lake.

Exhibited:

A.Y. Jackson: Paintings 1902-1953, Art Gallery of Toronto, Toronto, ON; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, QC; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, MB, 1953-54, no. 66, as, Sunshine and Fog, Eldorado Mines, Great Bear Lake, dated c. 1940.

Note:

In 1938, Gilbert Labine, owner of the Eldorado Silver Mines on Great Bear Lake, arranged to fly A.Y. Jackson (1882-1974) to that bustling mining community where he reveled in hiking throughout the area, capturing the mining town and its operations from various vantages. Upon his return, Jackson proudly submitted major canvases from this trip for exhibition both in Canada and internationally, including the New York World’s Fair. Today, results of his six-week stay may be found in major collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the McMichael Canadian Collection.
 
Jackson had been to the area a decade before in the company of Frederick Banting and a small coterie of prospectors as guides. It had been an unforgettable trip, not least because of the over-abundance of mosquitoes that were fatally drawn to Jackson’s oil paints, preventing him from working with that medium and compelling him to rely on pencil sketches alone. Jackson had been impressed with the region on that first trip – awestruck by the magnitude of Great Bear Lake, which is some 12,000 square miles and the eighth largest in the world – and was keen to return.

Thrilled by the vast scale, Dennis Reid notes that Jackson wrote to his niece, enthusing: “The skies are far away and everything that takes place does it over a thousand square miles.” Describing a less inhabited landscape by Jackson from this same period, one which depicts rugged terrain, rudimentary trees and a “multicoloured carpet of robust plant life", Reid asks “Is there a place for man in such land?” The answer for Jackson, as evinced by Sun and Fog, is most decidedly, yes. Reid writes: “(Jackson’s) attention would be drawn increasingly to that extensive part of the country that neither contained the soil nor enjoyed the climate to sustain settled life, but that nonetheless drew hardy, adventurous men with its promise of hidden wealth.”
 
By the early thirties, the settlement had grown considerably and when Jackson returned for his second visit it was home to roughly 200 “hardy, adventurous” people, Hudson Bay Company and RCMP outposts, a post office, a radio station and other government offices. 
 
Jackson was in Port Radium from August 26 to the end of September 1938, when he conceived of Sun and Fog. At that time of year, the area sees its highest amount of precipitation, nearly double that of any other month. The moistness of the air would have resulted in an early morning haze which the rising sun would slowly burn away. In this painting, we see a few workers in the settlement beginning their routine or perhaps heading to the canteen for breakfast before the day begins in earnest. Sun and Fog is a lasting record of this seminal period in the life of an industry which Canada dominated on a global scale – the extraction of radium. Nothing remains of this settlement today and in 2016 the Great Bear Lake watershed was declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, the largest in the world and the first to be led by an Indigenous community. 

Contact A Specialist