PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Per Wijkman, Esq., Swedish Embassy, Ottawa and then Stockholm
By descent to the present Private Collection, Stockholm

LITERATURE
James Edward Hervey MacDonald, “A Glimpse of the West,” The Canadian Bookman, vol. 6, no. 11, November 1924, page 231

Noted overlaps exist between modern Canadian and Swedish art: the 1913 exhibition Contemporary Scandinavian Art at Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery was a crucial influence on the formation of the Group of Seven. A similar intersection can be said of Canadian and Swedish diplomacy, which features in the provenance of this J.E.H. MacDonald oil sketch. Its original owner, Per Wijkman, was the inaugural Swedish ambassador to Canada.

In August of 1943, the year this position was created, Sweden closed its consulate in Montreal in favour of an embassy in Ottawa, with Mr. Wijkman similarly relocated. It was during his time in Montreal that he likely visited Dr. Max Stern’s Dominion Gallery, where Larches Above Lake O’Hara was later purchased. Notably, Dr. Stern’s wife, Iris Westerberg, was also Swedish. The couple met via a World War II Canadian refugee organization, which very possibly overlapped with Mr. Wijkman’s diplomatic role.

It is fitting that the first owner of this work was Swedish, given that it was while attending that 1913 exhibition that MacDonald realized how a contemporary expression of Canadian landscape painting might be manifested. You see those inspirations on display here, in MacDonald’s gestural, intimate and immediate expression of Lake O’Hara, one of his most beloved locales. MacDonald traveled to the Rockies annually beginning in 1924, with this journey in August and September of 1930 being his last. The bright-yellow larches of fall provide a fresh and joyous contrast in the mountain landscape that continually inspired MacDonald, with other examples of this subject to be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. When describing them in 1924, it is as though MacDonald were speaking about this very work:

…and there are the trees, the spruce and the balsam and the plumy Lyall’s Larch. This last especially is a beautiful color note in memory, as it began to get the gold of autumn on it before I came away, and that, with the delicate purple-grey of the branches mingling with it made a dream tree of paradise.

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