Vendu pour : 58 500 $

PROVENANCE
Lady Henrietta Banting, Toronto
Paul Ivanier, Montreal
Kenneth G. Heffel Fine Art Inc., Vancouver, 1981
Private Collection, Vancouver, 1984

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson, 1958, page 75
D.B.G. Fair, Banting & Jackson: An Artistic Brotherhood, 1997, page 23

EXPOSITION
Hart House, University of Toronto, Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Sir Frederick Banting, February 13 - March 1, 1943, label on verso

A.Y. Jackson wrote in his autobiography, in reference to a 1927 sketching trip with Frederick Banting to Quebec, “This was Banting’s first experience of painting out of doors in winter time. It was March, but there was no sign of spring, and we were working in very exposed country. The winds swept in from the Gulf and there was no shelter from them. Banting persisted, though it was an ordeal for him. I found him one day crouched behind a rail fence, the snow drifting into his sketch box and his hands so cold he could hardly work. He turned to me and said, ‘And I thought this was a sissy game.’ ”

Banting is known internationally as the scientist who co-discoverered insulin, used to treat diabetes. It was, perhaps, the international attention that this achievement brought him (along with a shared Nobel Prize with his research partner Dr. Charles Best and later, a knighthood) that caused him to seek the solitude of landscape painting in his free time. He is known to have been a private, modest person, and would have enjoyed the company of the similarly inclined Jackson, who became a close friend, and with whom he would travel far afield in Canada to sketch. The exact circumstances of their meeting are unclear, but Banting is thought to have met Jackson in the mid-1920s, possibly as the result of Banting having shown a number of his own works at an exhibition with the Hart House Sketch Club in January of 1925 in Toronto. At about the same time and through Jackson, Banting met Dr. James MacCallum and painter Lawren Harris, and was elected a member of the Arts and Letters Club.

Banting discovered that he and Jackson shared not only numerous personality traits, but also an interest in depicting the beauty of the Canadian land. Both were avid storytellers, tough and self-sufficient, and each respected deeply the achievements of the other; that both of them had served overseas during the First World War was a further bond. Banting also shared Jackson’s love of rural Quebec and the North, and they decided to undertake a sketching trip together in March of 1927. After some initiation via Jackson, Banting came to enjoy “roughing it”, braving painting in the winter, and he would subsequently accompany Jackson on numerous sketching trips, including the famous Arctic trip aboard the supply ship SS Beothic in the summer of 1927. They are known to have painted at the location of this fine scene, the French River area of Ontario (from Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay) in 1930 and 1934.

Although Banting had been painting before he met Jackson, the influence of Jackson’s brush-stroke and colour sense can be seen in Banting’s work. On their sketching trips, Jackson would provide Banting with a nightly critique, some of which is recorded in Banting’s diaries. He wrote, “To sketch one must be able to draw, get tone, get colour, get relations, get design, and get simplification. That is all there is to it.” He adopted Jackson’s colour notation methods, and his work developed rapidly as a result of the companionship and tutoring provided by his friend and mentor, who at the time was already one of the most famous artists in Canada.

French River is a fine canvas, balanced in colour and filled with harmonious movement. The silvery, rolling rocks are marked with highlights of accenting colour, and the snow settled into the hollows leads our eye upward though the trees and into the churning pattern of blues and greens topped by white peaks in the distant clouds.

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