Sold for: $5,938

PROVENANCE
Peter Ohler Fine Arts Ltd., Vancouver
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, British Columbia

LITERATURE
Canadian Pacific Railway Company and Canadian Pacific Hotels, Quebec and the Chateau Frontenac: The Ancient Town and Its Modern Hostelry, 1911, unpaginated, reproduced back cover
Robert Stacey and Hunter Bishop, J.E.H. MacDonald, Designer: An Anthology of Graphic Design, Illustration and Lettering, 1996, reproduced page 18

EXHIBITED
Applied Art Gallery, Toronto, 32nd Annual Canadian National Exhibition, August – September 1910

Following his time at Carlton Studios in London, England, J.E.H. MacDonald moved back to Toronto in 1907 and rejoined the commercial design firm Grip Printing and Publishing Company as a senior designer. During his time there, he would benefit from the growing use of photographic reproduction technologies, which provided him with the freedom to paint images for direct reproduction without needing to worry about a reinterpretation by engravers or lithographers. These new technologies gave artists unprecedented creative freedom to develop their own styles, resulting in what later became known as the “golden age of illustration.”

In this illustration, MacDonald depicts a stunning nighttime view of Lévis and the St. Lawrence from the Dufferin Terrace in Quebec City. MacDonald initially created this work for reproduction on the back cover of the 1911 tourism pamphlet Quebec and the Chateau Frontenac, produced by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and Canadian Pacific Hotels.

The pamphlet’s promotional copy reads in part as follows:

For without boasting it may well be said that the Chateau is Quebec—the centre of its modern, everyday life; the City’s dances, banquets and bridge parties are given within its walls: everyone meets everyone else at tea-time in its attractive Tea Room in winter or in the Terrace Café in the summer.

Dufferin Terrace under the Chateau’s windows is the promenade of the City, and surely no other city has one that can vie with it in the beauty of its view, in the exhilarating freshness of its air.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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