The York boat was a vessel used by the Hudson’s Bay Company to carry cargo through the inland lakes and waterways of Rupert’s Land, trading the lightness of a birchbark canoe for the size and durability of a full-sized wooden hull. Named after the HBC’s headquarters of York Factory on Hudson Bay and typically piloted by Métis boatmen, the York boat was fast and efficient, propelling up to six tonnes of cargo by either oars or, on open water, a square sail that doubled as a tent at camp. By the 1920s, in the face of steamships and rail lines, the boats fell out of favour, though the Norway House Cree Nation still holds boat races at the Treaty and York Boat Days festival every August. Walter J. Phillips here renders the boats in brilliant colours as they ripple through the glassy lake. He would return to the subject in a dramatic form a few years later with his stormy York Boat on Lake Winnipeg (1931), one of the artist’s most celebrated woodcut prints.

For more information on the Hudson's Bay Company Calendar Paintings in PDF format, please click here.