Frederick Banting: Finding the Beauty in the Ruins

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  In late September 1932, Dr. Frederick Grant Banting of insulin fame and Nobel Prize winner in Medicine (1923) arrived in Cobalt, Ontario to meet up with A.Y. Jackson where they sketched together into mid-October.

• They first met at Toronto’s Arts & Letters Club in 1927 and soon became close friends. Jackson took Banting under his tutelage with a trip to the Arctic, followed by trips to Saint Fidèle and Saint-Irène, Quebec.
• Banting respected the rhythm in Jackson’s landscapes, remarking that, “Rhythm in a picture is a subtle something which cannot be described but only felt (If a painting has not got rhythm it is not a Jackson).”[1] Banting appreciated these excursions as they gave him much needed time away from the public life his medical career demanded.
• By the time Banting arrived in Cobalt, the place was an environmental calamity after three decades of silver extraction. Banting produced sketches of the derelict mines and residential areas. They experienced poor weather including rain and snow. As Jackson recalled to a friend, a storm had made the roads almost impassable, cars were stalled all over, and nearly a foot of snow was piled on top of everything.
• Both Banting and Jackson made good use of the fresh snow to pretty up the ruins in Cobalt, but not in this sketch which presents a harsher reality of Cobalt’s then lifeless hills and broken-down structures. Three power poles in the far distance lean awkwardly from lack of maintenance but they do bring attention to the towering mine shaft and sky, Banting’s principal subjects. It was on a clear day that Banting painted this accomplished sketch with its deep blue sky and two huge cumulus clouds.
• Cobalt only formed a small element of Banting’s painting activities, but his work there was significant enough for inclusion in his memorial retrospective at Hart House, University of Toronto held in February 1943, after Banting’s regrettable death in a plane crash during war service on February 21, 1941 at age 49.
• [1] Catharine Mastin, Cobalt: A Mining Town and the Canadian Imagination (Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2024), 104.
• Contributed by Catharine Mastin, PhD, an independent curator and writer. Mastin was the guest curator of Cobalt: A Mining Town and the Canadian Imaginationpresented at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg in 2024 and author of the accompanying catalogue. She is currently writing the first biography on Franklin Carmichael.

ABOUT THE AUCTION

Cobalt is offered in our spring 2025 spring auction of Canadian & International Fine Art auction as lot 346.

Our major spring auction of Canadian and International Fine Art features an exceptional collection of important works by noted Canadian and international artists including Frederick Banting, Jack Bush, Clarence Gagnon, William Kurelek, Jean Paul Lemieux, J.W. Morrice, William Perehudoff, Takao Tanabe, Bernard Buffet, Jean Dufy, Francisco Zúñiga, Larry Poons, Jules Olitski, and many more.

The auction is offered online May 8 – 29, 2025.

Previews at our Toronto gallery located at 100 Broadview Avenue, are available:

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