CGP CSGA CSPWC
1882 - 1953
Canadian
Little Reflections, Dart's Lake, Adirondacks, NY
watercolour on paper
signed, dated Sept. 29, 1921 and inscribed "Dart's Camp" and on verso inscribed by Douglas Duncan "#95" (crossed out) / "#98" (crossed out) / "#141"
15 x 22 1/2 in, 38.1 x 57.2 cm
Estimate: $30,000 - $50,000 CAD
Sold for: $52,250
Preview at:
PROVENANCE
Douglas Duncan Picture Loan Society, Toronto, circa 1960
Private Collection, Ottawa
By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario
LITERATURE
David Milne Jr. and Nick Johnson, "David Milne: His Journal and Letters of 1920 and 1921, a Document of Survival," artscanada no. 30, August 1973, reproduced page 53
David P. Silcox, Painting Place: The Life and Work of David B. Milne, 1996, reproduced page 144
David Milne Jr. and David P. Silcox, David B. Milne: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume 1: 1882 - 1928, 1998, page 314, reproduced page 325, catalogue #203.29
EXHIBITED
Art Association of Montreal, 1924, titled as Across the Lake, catalogue #82
Arts Club, Montreal, 1924
From May of 1921, due to their difficult financial straits, David and Patsy Milne moved to Big Moose in the western Adirondacks to work at the summer resort called Dart’s Camp. The resourceful Milne razed a small tool shed and rebuilt it as a little cabin beside the lake. With his afternoons and evenings free, Milne painted watercolours en plein air and on the porch of the cabin when it rained, working on the reductive and original drybrush watercolour style that he had developed earlier in France and Belgium. In his autobiography he wrote, “The Dart’s pictures were all in the same vein. They might be described as line drawings in colour. Shape was all-important, colour was a mere agent in simplifying the form. The chief means of simplification was form itself, a contrast of open and worked-over spaces.”
This watercolour is spare in its use of form - the reflections appearing only in small sections in the mid-lake, the trees in the hills just outlines, their black lines twinned with lines in a carefully controlled palette of green and reddish and orange brown. At least half of the watercolour is bare paper. In Little Reflections, Dart's Lake, Adirondacks, NY, Milne’s minimalist approach focuses attention on his elegant use of line and allows his forms to vibrate through the space he left.
Estimate: $30,000 - $50,000 CAD
All prices are in Canadian Dollars
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