David and Patsy Milne moved back to Canada from the USA in 1929, lived briefly in Toronto, and arrived in Palgrave, in the Caledon Hills north of Toronto, in the spring of 1930. Palgrave was a village of about 100 at this time and had only a few larger buildings, of which this hotel was one. Milne was as taken with the forms of these simple structures as he was with the surrounding countryside. To some extent, his paintings of this time treat them as one aesthetic unit. For example, the loosely painted, highly illuminated white of the sky is here continued onto the hotel’s roof.

The Milne catalogue raisonné suggests that this painting is closely related to Serenity (cat. #302.94) and Village in the Sun (cat. #302.95). Queen’s Hotel on a Sunny Morning shares with the former the unique effect Milne experienced and rendered in the meeting of land and sky near the horizon, but this painting takes up a closer viewpoint that emphasizes architectural forms over landscape.

This view of Palgrave was accomplished with Milne’s characteristic parsimony. He was sparing with his pigments for economic as well as aesthetic reasons. As he explained in a letter from this time:

The reason for this way of putting on the paint is a feeling for economy—of aesthetic means … a hankering to do things by the slightest touch on the canvas, the brush meeting it and no more.… Some feeling of economy prevents me from varying hues in the same picture (by adding white or less white). This is so strong that I sacrifice economy of touch … to economy of value in the hues. These things are slight when put in words but they are very strong and control you pretty completely.[1]

In Queen’s Hotel on a Sunny Morning, we see one way in which Milne was economical and at the same time able to produce a strong composition, in other words, the way his strong aesthetic principles dovetailed with economic necessity. He uses fully saturated black lines and rectilinear passages to structure the image and to function as highlights across the surface. Black is an assertive agent here, outlining forms such as the roofline of the hotel, creating spatial boundaries but never becoming descriptive. These black lines and forms dance with patches of red, orange, purple and green to create a highly animated view of the village.

We thank Mark A. Cheetham for contributing the above essay. Cheetham is a freelance writer and curator and a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. He has written extensively on Canadian artists, including Jack Chambers, Alex Colville, Robert Houle and Camille Turner.

1. Quoted in David P. Silcox, Painting Place: The Life and Work of David B. Milne (University of Toronto Press, 1996), 240.