PROVENANCE
Heffel Gallery Limited, Vancouver
Private Collection, Oklahoma
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 24, 2006, lot 180
Private Collection, Toronto

EXHIBITED
BC Society of Fine Arts, 28th Annual Exhibition, April 29 – May 15, 1938, catalogue #44
BC Society of Fine Arts, 30th Annual Exhibition, May 17 – June 2, 1940, titled as Church Mountains, catalogue #44
Vancouver Art Gallery, Exhibition by W.P Weston, ARCA, November 12 – December 1, 1946, catalogue #18

Church Mountain is a prime example of W.P. Weston’s celebration of mountains, an exciting canvas that captures the majesty of an epic and compelling subject. Weston painted this work in 1938, when he was at the height of his powers in depicting the rugged environment of the West Coast. Arriving in Canada in 1909 from England, where he had trained at the Putney School of Art, Weston quickly realized that the conservative English romantic approach to landscape would not be able to capture the scale of the scenes that surrounded him in Vancouver. To effectively communicate these novel spectacles, he began to hone a new approach, where definite forms and clean lines emerged to create patterns and volumes out of the vitality and drama of the mountainous coastal landscape.

In the decades to follow, Weston developed a style that was personally specific but also in concert with growing national artistic movements, including, most notably, the Group of Seven. In 1933, he had the opportunity to become a part of this wider community. Alongside fellow BC artist Emily Carr, Weston was among the charter members of the Canadian Group of Painters (CGP), the more geographically inclusive successor to the Group of Seven. Weston exhibited with this group and participated in the expansion of the country’s artistic identity, hence his monumental works are definitively integrated into the evolving story of Canadian landscape art.

The eponymous Church Mountain is located in Washington state to the north of Mount Baker, an area where Weston would find several striking subjects for his compositions. As mountains became a primary focus of his practice, he would use binoculars to record, in meticulous detail, their ridges and peaks, and then develop his sketches into dramatic yet clearly recognizable depictions in his paintings. Similar in spirit to the work of fellow CGP member Lawren Harris, Weston’s emphasis was on the underlying architecture and form of these mountains. Attempting to capture their grandeur, his work often focused on the treeless alpine realms generally above the activities and signs of people.

In an undated letter, Weston wrote:

From the first I was fascinated by the mountains—their terrific size, their wonderful structural forms with the consequent interesting snow patterns… One is so utterly insignificant among the mountains that I have always felt the introduction of the human element quite unnecessary and out of place.[1]

In this painting, all of the components work together holistically to impress upon the viewer a sense of scale and wonder, from the individual trees on the foreground hills to the arching sky of rhythmic clouds that the highest peak strives to pierce.

Church Mountain can be placed within a series of works from the 1930s best described as mountain portraits, where impressive and angular peaks are the focal points for grand compositions. Many of these works are now found in significant collections, including Cheam, in the Hart House Collection at the University of Toronto; Jötunheim, in the Audain Art Museum Collection (a depiction of Mount Wrottesley, over Howe Sound); and High Olympus and Canada’s Western Ramparts, in the National Gallery of Canada (depictions of Mount Olympus, in Washington’s Olympic Mountains, and Mount Dione, in BC’s Tantalus Range, respectively). All of these works, like Church Mountain, demonstrate the skill and care one of British Columbia’s finest landscape painters took to convey his reverence for this most inspiring of subjects.

1. Quoted in J. Russell Harper, Canadian Paintings in Hart House (Toronto: Art Committee of Hart House, University of Toronto, 1955), 52.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars