Sold for: $34,250

PROVENANCE
A Corporate Collection, Alberta
Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 27, 2004, lot 51
Private Collection, Toronto
By descent to the present Private Estate, Toronto

LITERATURE
Roger Burford Mason, A Grand Eye for Glory: A Life of Franz Johnston, 1998, page 70

EXHIBITED
Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, 1937

During the 1930s, Johnston made regular visits to northern Ontario, and continued to visit and paint there for the rest of his life. In the early 1930s Johnston first went to the Lake Nipigon area to paint a commission of a rare white team of huskies. At that time he met Jack McCurdy who owned a fishing camp on Onaman Lake near to Lake Nipigon, and who became a life-long friend. During Johnston’s frequent stays at McCurdy’s fishing camp, McCurdy was able to observe the artist at work, and one story had Johnston painting the northern lights on a frigid winter night by rushing outside to observe, then rushing back into the cabin to paint.

Johnston was exhibiting his northern paintings in Toronto galleries in the 1930s, and the critic August Bridle commented in 1936 about his “panorama of northland scenes in even more than his usual ecstasy of luminous heroic painting…[work of] marvellous clarity, rhythm, luminosity…a revelation of a new north.”

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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