The community of Bobcaygeon straddles the Bobcaygeon River, just to the southwest of Kawartha Highlands Provincial Park in southern Ontario. A.J. Casson visited the town in the mid-1930s with his wife, Margaret, renting a nearby cottage for a week’s stay. His watercolour Bobcaygeon (1934) is reproduced in the artist’s 1982 book My Favourite Watercolours, 1919 to 1957, and his accompanying text notes how he was attracted to the town’s “sense of tranquility on that autumn day.” Judging by the details in that work and this lovely on-site oil sketch, it must have been early autumn, which would align with Casson’s tendency to take holidays from his day job at the commercial art firm Sampson-Matthews Ltd. during their quieter summer months.

Street in Bobcaygeon displays multiple Casson hallmarks. One is his motif of rural buildings, many of which he viewed as vanishing into the past. Another is the deft use of green, said by fellow Group of Seven member A.Y. Jackson to be equaled only by British Columbia contemporary Emily Carr. Finally, this work also showcases Casson’s masterful expression of weather, palpably communicated in subtly stormy clouds and the long shadows of rustling trees in full leaf.

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