Sold for: $38,025

PROVENANCE
Pickering College, Newmarket, Ontario
Sold sale of Important Canadian Art, Sotheby's Canada, November 18, 1986, lot 352
Private Collection, Ontario
By descent to a Private Collection, Ontario
Sold sale of Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 15, 2013, lot 106
Private Collection, British Columbia

Purchased at Heffel's Spring 2013 auction for $38,025 including Buyer's Premium
Estimate was $20,000 - $30,000

LITERATURE
Paul Duval, The Tangled Garden: The Art of J.E.H. MacDonald, 1978, page 53, the related 1915 canvas entitled Logs on the Gatineau, in the collection of the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, reproduced page 67

In 1914, J.E.H. MacDonald began to venture further afield from his home in Toronto to paint. As he had already worked in the Laurentians, he took a March trip to Algonquin Park with J.W. Beatty, meeting up with A.Y. Jackson who was already camping and sketching there. After this, MacDonald explored the area around Minden, north of Toronto, and later in that same year painted “a series of brilliant on-the-spot studies” along the banks of the Gatineau River. One of these was “the superb sketch [in the collection of the Art Gallery of Windsor] for the major 1915 canvas, Logs on the Gatineau [in the collection of the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon]” as Paul Duval writes. Another is this fine lot. Here MacDonald gives us all of the rapid brushwork and harmonious palette that characterizes his outdoor sketches. The treatment of the logs, water and rocks on the near shore conveys the idea of a tangled, log-strewn riverbank quite nicely, while the distant hill, shore and sky are delineated with a very different brush-stroke, conveying a feeling of misty distance and softness that contrasts with the hurry and tumble of the river.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars