Cobalt, located on the Ontario-Quebec border some 140 kilometres north of North Bay, near the western shore of Lake Timiskaming, briefly achieved boom-town status at the turn of the twentieth century, spurred by deposits of silver and cobalt discovered by surveyors for the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway in 1903. A silver rush followed, with mines, worker housing and attendant businesses springing out of the hills faster than roads could be built around them.

This rush was short-lived, however, and by the time A.Y. Jackson first visited Cobalt in the autumn of 1932 with his friend and painting partner Dr. Frederick Banting, the once-bustling mining town had declined significantly. Here, Jackson found an able subject in the town’s jumbled, snow-covered rooftops, steeply winding roads, and teetering mining towers with the same romance and picturesque charm that he found in the rustic farmhouses of rural Quebec. As he recalled later: “The palmy days were over by the time I got there, but the people had stayed on, subsisting somehow. It was a wonderful place to paint, especially under some snow. I can’t find a thing to work on in towns laid out on a grid.”

Jackson’s contemporary scenes set in Charlevoix or the Laurentians often depicted the resilience of rural life within a winter landscape: tilted fences and weathered farmhouses sagging under snow and nestled in the sweep of a hill. In contrast, his depiction of the town in Cobalt, Early Snow is much more primordial in tone. From the vantage of a high foreground hill, the ragged roofs seem to emerge from the rolling landscape of northern Ontario with an expressive geometry. Covered by an early autumnal snowfall, the houses are rendered in a chromatic motley of blues, reds and yellows, while a meandering road picks its way between the ramshackle buildings. Under an overcast sky and with further hills in the distance, the town feels less enclosed by the landscape than sprouting directly from it—a reflection of how quickly the community was thrown together during the boom years.

Jackson was so pleased with this scene that he painted it as a full canvas entitled Mining City, Cobalt, Ontario (sold by Heffel in May 2017). That painting more fully reveals elements that the artist already includes here: the brown-coloured dots on the central curve of road near the horizon are now a pair of figures and a typically Jackson horse and sled, while the thin forms in the foreground, first understood as winter trees sparse of branches, are shown to be the curved arcs of telephone poles.

While the dating for the canvas Mining City, Cobalt, Ontario was circa 1932, it is possible that that painting and Cobalt, Early Snow could date from Jackson’s second trip to Cobalt in 1935. The best evidence for this would be Jackson’s own dating on a label on the verso of the work—though this was very likely added many years after the fact, and the artist did not always have a reliable memory. Further evidence for a 1935 date can be found in the partially finished sketch on the verso of the painting, which trades the crowded rooftops of Cobalt for a tangled screen of trees and rocks. With scraggy pines and birches among pinkish rocks, the forest has the sun-baked composure of late summer in Ontario—and indeed, Jackson had traveled to Georgian Bay in September 1935 before turning further north, sketching in Cobalt that October. In either date, Jackson’s depictions of the dilapidated industrial town from this period are among his most captivating images, with Cobalt, Early Snow standing as an evocative example.