Despite a long familiarity with the Maritimes stretching back to the First World War, Arthur Lismer only visited Cape Breton Island for the first time with his wife Esther in 1940. They would return there on four more summer trips between 1945 and 1950, usually staying around the villages of Ingonish and Neil’s Harbour. Among the subjects that most interested Lismer here were the docks and wharves used by the local fishermen, awash with the haphazardly piled nets, buoys, stone killicks and wooden buckets that comprised their gear. Cape Breton Island is an exceptional exploration of the visual pleasure that can be found in the riotous activity of these tools of sea-bound life: the arc of a fish is echoed by the curves of salt-rusted anchors, while the tangle of ropes and litter portend the turmoils of the ocean backdrop.

Rather than still lifes, Lismer viewed his Cape Breton works more as unconscious abstractions of a natural order, akin to the tangled Georgian Bay landscapes he painted in the 1930s. He wrote that the pieces of fishing gear, “many made by hand … have a human quality … and they seem to have as well the same feeling of weather as pine trees.… To rearrange them into formal still lifes would be to kill them. I am too fond of the things themselves to want to change them into something else.” Dynamically rendered with a rich flotsam of detail, Cape Breton Island celebrates the inherent beauty of a working life in tune with the environment.

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