PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
The Collection of Torben V. Kristiansen, Vancouver

Arthur Lismer’s bright and colourful depictions of the Canadian North are brilliant reminders of the charm and vitality of the Ontario summer. Capturing both quiet moments and grand scenes alike, his sketches of the lakes and forests were often done while on holiday, which, according to his daughter, “meant physically transposing his family and studio to the great outdoors.”[1]

Painted in August 1944, on the artist’s second trip to the region, Temagami Shore captures the intimacies of a warm, late-summer scene, filled with the colours and textures with which the artist had become so well acquainted. The work places the viewer directly into the tranquility of the shoreline setting, right on the rocks in the shallows and next to a tangle of branches and a partially submerged silver-white stump.

Lismer’s summer sketching trips would provide abundant material for him to work up onto canvases in the studio during the rest of the year. Temagami Shore was a work that clearly caught the artist’s eye, and in May 1945, he painted a 20 x 24-inch canvas based on it, entitled Temagami Backwater (sold by Heffel May 27, 2015, lot 113).

1. Marjorie Lismer Bridges, A Border of Beauty: Arthur Lismer’s Pen and Pencil (Toronto: Red Rock, 1977), front flap.

For the biography on Torben V. Kristiansen in PDF format, please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars