Lot # 163

David Brown Milne
1882 - 1953

Reader and Cat, Boston Corners, NY
oil on canvas

19 7/8 x 23 7/8 in   50.5 x 60.6 cm

Provenance:
Estate of the Artist
Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collector, Toronto, 1977

After several years in New York City, David Milne and his wife left to settle in the small hamlet of Boston Corners in the rural countryside of the state. Milne wanted to be able to continue his business of making signs, but was also interested in finding a place where he could paint without the distractions of the city. During his first period in Boston Corners, from 1916 to 1918, Milne devoted much of his time to the landscape of the area but he also produced a number of advanced figurative works.
In these works, Milne was not interested in portraying the individual, and although we know that his main subject at this time was his wife Patsy, her identity is not critical to our understanding or appreciation of the painting. Milne was interested in exploring ideas of spatial development, light, colour and form. All of these elements were used to create striking visual statements that are more about the effects that they generate on our retinas than their subjects. Reader and Cat, Boston Corners, NY is an excellent example of Milne’s preoccupations at the time, and is a striking and visually exciting image.
Using a relatively limited range of colours (blue, black, white, green, yellow-green and orange) for purely visual rather than descriptive effect, Milne has given us a complete and contained world that is at once extremely simple and quite complex. This paradox is explained by his transformation of a quite simple subject - a woman reading a book while a cat rests on her lap - into a flickering form which seems at times solid and at others transparent. Indeed, it is possible that the subject of the work is not immediately apparent to most viewers but this is of little concern to Milne, who is more concerned with guiding our eyes around the image so that it can be gradually revealed to us. While for most the principal subject would be the woman and secondarily the cat, for Milne the whole of the canvas surface is treated equally. Indeed, there is no clear distinction between where her body ends and where the ground upon which she rests begins; one seems to flow into the other. Milne achieves this control of our eye movements by using colour strategically, placing, for example, areas of blue on the head of the woman and the body of the cat. Clearly this is not the world as most of us see it, and yet it is a visual world that has a definite logic and a particular power. Despite the fact that her left forearm is orange, white, blue and black, we clearly understand that it is an arm and sense the space that it occupies. Where the sense of space is a little more complex is in the definition of the pictorial space as a whole - how, for example, does the rocky formation on which she sits relate to the area of foliage in the upper left of the canvas? While Milne does include indications of overlapping planes, the use of intense colour tends to negate the sense of space that might be created by the overlaps. Colour is used to define and deny boundaries and forms. The eye flits across the image attracted by density of drawing, areas of flatter colour and pattern that inflect every area of the surface. Where Milne reveals his mastery is in the fact that the work is lucid, balanced and yet bursts with visual excitement. Few other artists working at the time were capable of mastering such a complex range of elements, and one is reminded of the example of his fellow Armory Show exhibitor, Henri Matisse.
The consignor will donate the proceeds from the sale of this work to Canadian charities.


Estimate: $150,000 ~ $250,000
Sold for: $245,700.00