PROVENANCE
Helen E. Band, Toronto
Par filiation à la collection privée actuelle, Toronto

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country : l’autobiographie d’A.Y. Jackson, 1958, page 46

A.Y. Jackson’s first formal sketching trip to Lake Superior was in autumn of 1921, following a Group of Seven trip to Algoma, when he accompanied Lawren Harris to the north shore of Lake Superior. He continued to paint Lake Superior in the company of Harris in the autumn of 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1925. The intrepid explorers camped in this wild and desolate landscape. They carefully set up their campsite, building a stone fireplace and filling a trench in their tent with hot embers from the fire to keep warm on cold nights.

After the visual opulence of Algoma, Harris was inspired by the open vistas and sculptural rocky headlands of Lake Superior. While Harris looked out to the lake, Jackson was more interested in depicting the land surrounding it. Much of this area had been razed by forest fires, exposing the landscape we see here—rolling hills and rocky plateaus, with stumps and bare trunks of trees still standing. These survivors were featured by both artists, and Jackson recounted that on one occasion, they discovered an interesting stump almost hidden in the bush, which Harris included in his canvas North Shore, Lake Superior, giving it a lake background instead.

Here Jackson was drawn to an expansive inland view with the lake in the distance, firmly planting his easel on the foreground rocky ledge. Jackson’s colour palette is characteristically dimensional—the ledges are depicted with tones of pink and mauve, while green swirls of mosses are animated by bright sparks of red and orange. The hillside beyond glows with dabs of autumn warmth, and his layers of clouds glow with flesh tones and greyish blue and green. As Jackson stated in his autobiography, “I know of no more impressive scenery in Canada for the landscape painter. There is a sublime order to it.… Inland there are intimate little lakes, stretches of muskeg, outcrops of rock.… In the autumn the whole country glows with colour; the huckleberry and the pincherry turn crimson, the mountain ash is loaded with red berries, the poplar and the birch turn yellow and the tamarac greenish gold.” Lake Superior is an outstanding example of Jackson’s fresh, on-the-spot oil sketches of this “sublime” land.

This work was once in the prestigious collection of Helen E. Band, the daughter of prominent Toronto collector Charles E. Band.

Please note: this work is a split panel.

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