PROVENANCE
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
The Art Emporium, Vancouver, 2005
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson, 1958, page 75

A.Y. Jackson had a long and productive relationship with Georgian Bay: from 1910 up until 1967, he would take extended trips to sketch the windswept inlets, rocky shores and broad waters of the area. After fortuitously meeting Toronto ophthalmologist Dr. James MacCallum on one of these trips in 1913, Jackson would stay at the art patron’s cabin in Go Home Bay. From this staging post, Jackson would explore the area by canoe, creating vibrant and immediate sketches of the intricate channels and ragged islands strung along the eastern shore.

Pine Island, a scrap of rocks out in the middle of the bay about four miles from MacCallum’s cottage on West Wind Island, was an exposed and dramatic subject: “It is a rock about a third of a mile long, flat on top and sloping steeply down to deep water; a few wind-blown pines make a lively silhouette against the sky, and some years herons build their nests in the trees. In good weather people from Go Home Bay have picnics there.”

This work, produced at the end of the Group of Seven period, presents an animated tableau. Sparse, spindly trees are silhouetted against a quickly moving sky, while the swirl of rocky shore glows with a warm intensity, as if lit by a low sun. The drifting clouds, bent pines and vibrating water all seem to suggest the gusty summertime gales that sweep across Georgian Bay, presenting a classic and quintessential subject of Jackson and the Group.

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