Sold for: $40,950

PROVENANCE
Acquired as a wedding present in 1971 from the Artist by the present Private Collection, Scotland

LITERATURE
Jack Shadbolt, "Maxwell Bates (1906 - 1980)", artscanada 37, December 1980 / January 1981, page 2
Patricia E. Bovey, A Passion for Art, The Art and Dynamics of the Limners, 1996, reproduced in a photograph of a scene from Maxwell Bates's seventieth birthday party, page 51

This work appears in a photograph of Maxwell Bates’s seventieth birthday party at the Victoria home of Robin Skelton, a well-known poet and academic, with the guests dressed as figures from Bates’s paintings. It is believed to be a self-portrait, the face an amalgam of dog / sheep / human features, clothing seemingly on backwards, an image consistent with Bates’s sense of sardonic humour and use of social satire. The Lonesome Road could refer to his looking back over his struggle as an artist and as a human being – he was a survivor of a German prisoner of war camp and of a stroke in 1961. In a tribute, artist Jack Shadbolt wrote, “He saw the world around him with no illusions but with human tolerance...His was the realism of the compassionate satirist. His technique and vision stemmed from Max Beckmann, with whom he studied and whom he admired unreservedly, but his extensions out of such a beginning were his own and unique.” Bates is one of Canada’s most important Expressionists, and the Lonesome Road is an outstanding example of his intense and complex portraits.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars