Sold for: $32,175

PROVENANCE
A gift from the Artist to Baron Byng High School, Montreal
The PSBGM Cultural Heritage Foundation
Sold sale of Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 15, 2013, lot 121

LITERATURE
Anne McDougall, Anne Savage: The Story of a Canadian Painter, 1977, pages 44 - 45

Anne McDougall writes, “Anne Savage sought light and rhythm and had a sure hand with a purple shadow beneath a bank or a burnt umber across a sunlit hayfield...she showed a joyful, fearless use of colour...she does not people her pictures with human beings...but turns again to landscape and throws joy into the sweeping tree or bank.”

Savage’s colours in this bright, enchanted scene are awash in sunlight. The effect is one of bleached brilliance, and the scrubbed, dry-brush application of paint furthers this effect. Her balanced composition consists of rolling hills set under an umbrella of trees that partially screens a distant hill, with all of this accented by a few small buildings. Savage varies her application of paint by a pattern of dotting in some of the tree boughs, and sets these next to ones painted with fluid smoothness. There are vertical brush-strokes to offset the horizontal ones, and the division of the whole scene by lyrical, sweeping lines of reddish-brown – quite Art Nouveau in their character – gives the scene a fine sense of design.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars