Sold for: $25,000

PROVENANCE
Richardson Brothers Art Gallery, Winnipeg
Acquired from the above by a Private Collection
By descent to the present Private Collection, Montreal

Walter Joseph Phillips first traveled to British Columbia in 1927. He visited several villages on the central coast and seems to have had a particular interest in Alert Bay, on Cormorant Island, traditional territory of the ‘Namgis First Nation. The landscape of the region was interesting to Phillips and he produced a number of watercolours. May’s Wharf, Alert Bay is one of the finest of these works, although it was not an image that he committed to print form. His first west coast prints were two images produced in 1928 as part of The Canadian Scene portfolio. The images The Waterfront, Alert Bay, British Columbia and Siwash House Posts, Tsatsisnukomi, British Columbia clearly establish Phillips as one of the most important chroniclers of the landscape of BC.

While it is unclear whether Phillips planned a woodcut of May’s Wharf, Alert Bay, the image is a notably concise and distinguished example of his watercolour technique. The Dong family, of which May Dong was a member, had a shop on Jim King’s wharf in Alert Bay, which was farther down the bay in relation to the wharf in our watercolour. Phillips was perhaps overly generous in attributing ownership of this whole wharf to the Dong family, but the importance of the family’s store on the nearby Jim King wharf is undisputed. The elegance of the image reflects the exquisite linearity of the dock itself, which needed to accommodate the extremely high tides of Alert Bay. The dock in the water could rise when the tide came in, and the large shift in water levels is equally reflected in the bare shore beneath the pier and at the base of the island in the middle distance.

There is an elegant tension within the image; the seemingly frail pattern of the supports for the dock and the buildings themselves set against the grandeur of the landscape suggest both the fragility and the tenacity of the settlers of the region. Phillips is conscious of both the elegance and the frailty of the buildings inserted into the landscape of the BC coast. The remoteness of Alert Bay and the delicacy of the wharf itself are suggested through the lack of human presence within the image—this despite the fact that we know the Dong family were part of the community through Phillips’s title.

The elegance of the image rests on Phillips’s ability to balance the linearity of the dock with the masses of the landscape forms that surround it. The decision to make the sky a large, undifferentiated form was an important one. It allowed Phillips to delineate the forms of both the landscape and the dock and buildings with a level of precision and exactitude that is striking and allows us to believe ourselves there. The decision to delineate the buildings and dock so exactingly against the generality of the landscape allowed Phillips to assert the importance of the structure. Indeed, it is the wharves of Alert Bay that allowed the community to communicate with the larger world.

Phillips, on his trip to British Columbia in 1927, recognized the significance of these coastal communities and the people, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who lived there. One of the remarkable facts about Phillips is that, although he was an outsider, his images of Indigenous coastal communities of BC are among the most compelling depictions of the region, including this sensitive watercolour.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars