PROVENANCE
A gift from the Artist to Emil and Virginia Walli, Great Bear Lake
By descent through the family to the present Private Collection, Ontario

LITERATURE
A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson, 1976, page 123

This painting comes with a very interesting provenance. It was given by the artist to Emil and Virginia Walli. Emil was the manager of the Eldorado mine and his wife Virginia (thought to have been the only woman at the mine) was known for her hospitality to Franz Johnston and A.Y. Jackson. She put them up in her house when the artists were in the area, sketching at Eldorado and in the Great Bear Lake vicinity.

In his autobigraphy 'A Painter's Country', Jackson writes: “We arrived at the radium mine, a little centre of industry in a great empty wilderness. Emil Walli, a Queen’s University man, was the manager. I spent six weeks at Eldorado, from August into October. The weather was lovely. I wandered over the rocky hills, which were easy to traverse. There were patches of spruce and small birch, and muskeg lakes, but mostly open rock. Walli’s little Scotch terrier took a shine to me and accompanied me on my rambles. The ravens were attracted by her; sometimes while I was sketching, a number of them would come around and stand watching her. She did not mind and they seemed merely curious.”

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