PROVENANCE
Estate of the Artist
Galerie Dresdnere, Toronto
Sold sale of Important Canadian Paintings, Drawings, Watercolours, Books and Prints, Sotheby's Canada, October 18, 1976, lot 29
Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary
Private Collection, Vancouver

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Peter Mellen, The Group of Seven, 1970, the 1916 panel Autumn Birches by Tom Thomson, in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, reproduced page 53
Megan Bice, Light and Shadow: The Work of Franklin Carmichael, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1990, pages 18 and 25
Catharine M. Mastin, Portrait of a Spiritualist: Franklin Carmichael and the National Gallery of Canada Collection, National Gallery of Canada, 2001, page 3

Franklin Carmichael was the youngest member of the Group of Seven, and he was very much a part of their beginning stages. As early as 1911, he met future Group members Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley and J.E.H. MacDonald while working at the commercial art firm Grip Ltd. in Toronto. In 1913, following in the footsteps of Lismer and Varley, Carmichael traveled to Antwerp to study at the Académie royale des beaux-arts, but in 1914, the onset of war brought him back to Canada.

Carmichael also met Group associate Tom Thomson at Grip Ltd., and in 1914 Carmichael moved into the Studio Building in Toronto and shared a studio with Thomson over the winter. Carmichael had a great admiration for his work, and, inspired by Thomson’s passion for Algonquin Park, he accompanied him there in 1915. Megan Bice wrote that “for Carmichael, Thomson and the other artists in their circle, life in the wild was an integral part of their visual expression of the landscape, and Thomson’s close relationship with the wilderness deeply impressed Carmichael.”

In 1915, Carmichael married Ada Went and his life changed - he was no longer so free to travel, and in 1916 moved to Thornhill, where family life and his work at the commercial art firm Rous & Mann Ltd. dictated his movements. For a time, other than a honeymoon in 1916 to Dr. James MacCallum’s cottage on Georgian Bay, his sketching trips were taken on holidays in southern Ontario - rather than on Group trips such as those to Algoma. He would not be part of a Group trip until 1925, when he went to the north shore of Lake Superior with Lawren Harris.

During the years preceding the first Group exhibition in 1920, Carmichael solidified his vision. Regarding Group members, he later stated, “There’s a characteristic common to all of them. They took what they had, gave what they had in themselves and produced a result that has far outlived their own particular time.” Carmichael gravitated to the landscapes of Ontario - first in southern Ontario and later the La Cloche region, in northern Ontario. At the time he painted this exquisite oil panel, he was focusing on sketches of this dimension and seems to have had a great attraction to autumn hillside subjects such as this.

From 1910 to 1916, Carmichael was reading about American Transcendentalism and theosophy. Although he never considered himself a theosophist, it was part of his quest for spiritual meaning, and Catharine Mastin notes that “he studied eternity, cosmology, astrology, reincarnation and the afterlife.” His views on nature were also influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed that we belong to a greater whole, and that the spirit world is alive in nature.

Thus Carmichael found harmony and beauty in landscapes such as this striking panorama. The view is grounded in the strong foreground rock formations, then glides out over a tapestry woven from a richly coloured profusion of growth. The brushwork has a bold, visceral approach that is reminiscent of Thomson’s work, such as his 1916 oil on panel Autumn Birches, in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Carmichael’s fine awareness of composition shows in elements such as the central orange tree that takes the viewer’s eye directly up into the blue sky, where floating cloud formations are illuminated around their edges. Rolling Hills, Autumn Hillside shows the great sensitivity to landscape that drew Carmichael to the Group. The alliance of their individual and passionate visions of the Canadian landscape, resulting in stunning works such as this, ensured that their work still inspires us today.

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