Sold for: $44,250

PROVENANCE
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
Kenneth G. Heffel Fine Art Inc., Vancouver
Peter and Joanne Brown Collection, Vancouver, acquired from the above in 1986

LITERATURE
A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson, 1958, page 90

In the summer of 1926, anthropologist Marius Barbeau undertook an extended research trip into the Skeena River region of British Columbia, asking painters A.Y. Jackson and Edwin Holgate to accompany him. Barbeau was interested in the totem poles there, and he felt that collaboration with artists would be the best way to document the villages of the Gitxsan First Nation. “The Skeena River was dangerous, cold, swift and muddy,” Jackson recounts in his autobiography. “Back from the river one soon encountered bush that was almost a jungle.” Holgate’s depiction of a village by the river is set with houses that seem to have sprung directly out of that wild jungle. The whole work is infused with a lush verdant green, even the river itself, which Holgate frames beautifully with arched tree limbs. When they returned east, Barbeau organized an exhibition of the artists’ work at the National Gallery of Canada, a show that would also include works by Emily Carr, who had painted in the region more than a decade before. Works from the Skeena expedition are not only rare, but they also mark an important milestone in Canadian art history.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars