PROVENANCE
PanCanadian Petroleum Ltd., Calgary
Private Collection, Alberta

LITERATURE
Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, June 1, 2022, the related 1982 canvas Late Light, Broughton Island reproduced page 48, lot 20

Doris McCarthy is widely celebrated as one of Canada’s great landscape painters. In a career spanning eight decades, she visited and painted in every corner of Canada, and she is remembered for her determined and adventurous spirit. Like her Group of Seven predecessors Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson, McCarthy actively sought new and remote vistas—and, beginning in 1972, she traveled regularly to Canada’s Far North.

The conditions on McCarthy’s arctic journeys were extreme, yet she remained fiercely committed to her craft. She employed inventive accommodations for sketching outdoors in the harsh climate: she stored tubes of paint beneath her base-layer clothing to keep the paint soft, and she added glycerine to her watercolours to prevent them from freezing. These remote excursions and the iconic images that came from them confirm McCarthy’s place within an important lineage of Canadian landscape painters.

This atmospheric canvas depicts a view from Broughton Island, off the east coast of immense Baffin Island in the Qikiqtaaluk region. McCarthy visited Broughton Island numerous times, including in the summer of 1981, when extended daylight would have illuminated the landscape throughout the evening hours. Even as the sculpted mountain forms of Baffin Island fall into shadow, the icy waters and striated sky emit bright warm light. At the right edge of the canvas, McCarthy has noted two small structures of the Qikiqtarjuaq settlement, their tiny box frames in stark contrast to the rugged forms and massive scale of the expansive northern landscape.

In the spring of 2022, Heffel offered a related McCarthy canvas for sale—a similar view from Broughton Island, but earlier in the evening. A comparison of the two works highlights McCarthy’s fascination with changing light and her expert ability to convey light’s transformative qualities with a delicate and subtle palette.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars