Sold for: $169,250

PROVENANCE
Aggregation Gallery Toronto
Collection of the Artist
Private Collection, Alberta

LITERATURE
William Moore and Stuart Reid, Celebrating Life: The Art of Doris McCarthy, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1999, pages 178 and 199

Doris McCarthy was an artist, teacher and writer who made an important contribution to Canadian landscape painting. From 1926 to 1930, she studied at the Ontario College of Art, under Group of Seven artists Arthur Lismer and J.E.H. MacDonald. Through them she met Lawren Harris and visited his studio as a teenager in 1928, at a time when his simplification and purification of form and commitment to a theosophical vision of the landscape were firmly established. She experienced the storm of change that occurred in the art world around the Group at this time, and her work was influenced by their groundbreaking art. Group member A.J. Casson commented that McCarthy was “a remarkable woman who developed her own vision and stuck to it.”

Firmly immersed in the Toronto art community, McCarthy was a member of the Ontario Society of Artists, the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour. From 1932 to 1972, she taught art at Toronto’s Central Technical School. Among her pupils was a young Joyce Wieland, who found in McCarthy a role model.

The landscape was McCarthy’s artistic focus, and from a young age she developed a love for nature; her father, George McCarthy, was an early conservationist who taught her that nature was an important part of her heritage. In 1939, she acquired land on the edge of the Scarborough Bluffs overlooking Lake Ontario. This property she called Fool’s Paradise, and it became her lifetime home and studio. She also purchased, collectively with a group of women, Keyhole Cottage on Georgian Bay, as a summer painting base.

In 1972, she made her first, fateful trip to the Arctic. She joined the Federation of Ontario Naturalists for a week, flying from Resolute to Eureka, Grise Fiord and remote islands, followed by Pond Inlet. John and Colly Scullion, who became collectors of her work, arranged a trip to view icebergs by dogsled. McCarthy commented, “In my first year in the Arctic I met my very first iceberg and I went crazy about icebergs and started doing ice form fantasies.” Many trips to the North would follow, her last taking place in 2004, at the age of 94. Her paintings of these striking forms created an important body of work, powerful and poetic.

McCarthy was part of the grand Canadian plein air tradition of braving the cold to paint on the spot, and she experienced the sound of ice cracking in the sub-zero cold and the tang of frigid arctic air. She also took photographs to help her develop her arctic paintings in the studio. In these works she is clearly influenced by Harris’s dramatic vision of arctic mountains and icebergs from the 1930s.

The location of this striking large-scale painting is the shore of Broughton Island, east of Baffin Island in the Arctic. Ice and snow formations in the foreground and in the distance, carved by the merciless arctic winds into sharp peaks, repeat, on a smaller scale, the mountain forms behind. The late-afternoon light emphasizes the modeling of their shapes, with blue and green shadows making their white edges light up. They are aesthetically pleasing, natural sculptures constantly honed by the wind. The sharp-angled arc of the clouds moving overhead and the turquoise shadows echoed in the sky add to the drama of the scene.

The small Inuit settlement on the shores of the strait with its homes, and the equipment out on the ice floes, puts the scene into perspective - the people’s survival in the midst of this harsh environment seems miraculous. But you also feel keenly the wonder of their stunning location, as they bear witness to this beauty. In Late Light, Broughton Island, McCarthy created an incredible sense of this unique place. As critic John Bentley Mays wrote, “Her large landscapes…bring those distant places near…a visible document of Miss McCarthy’s inward apprehension of what it is to stand on the very edge of the world.”

In 2004, the Doris McCarthy Gallery opened at the University of Toronto Scarborough. The gallery has a permanent collection of over 200 of the artist's works and acts to preserve her legacy.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars