Sold for: $152,100

PROVENANCE
Douglas Duncan, Picture Loan Society, Toronto
R. MacDonald, Woodbridge, Ontario, 1960
Private Collection, Toronto, circa 1968
By descent to the present Private Collection

LITERATURE
David P. Silcox, Painting Place: The Life and Work of David B. Milne, 1996, page 79 and reproduced page 80
David Milne Jr. and David P. Silcox, David B. Milne: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume 1: 1882 - 1928, 1998, reproduced page 173, catalogue #107.52

David Milne moved a great deal during his career. Perpetually impecunious as well as endlessly curious about landscape motifs, he made the most of his surroundings. His work from Boston Corners in New York State is some of the finest he ever did, and Drying Waterfall stands out even in this company.

Milne painted both long and close views of the landscape at this time. Where the more distant prospects are distinguished by their openness, an effect accomplished with his usual minimal application of pigment and by leaving many areas of the surface untouched, Drying Waterfall brings us into an intimate visual relationship with nature’s complex forms and colours. Boldly intricate, the scene of a waterfall diminishing in force with the change of season displays a remarkable range of forms, hues and lines. Milne brings our eyes to the brink of confusion with this view: what, we might wonder at first, is the theme, the central motif? Yet with the attentive looking he demanded of himself and, in turn, of those who see his work, the scene becomes readily legible without losing any of its density.

Drying Waterfall is, as a physical painting, an intensely delicate lattice of interlocking elements carefully delineated by Milne’s signature outlines. The result might remind us of cloisonné, the elaborate compartmentalization of miniature coloured insets on metal work, long practiced in many cultures and adapted to painting in the late nineteenth century, particularly by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. But Milne’s image is not flat or still. It depicts at least three spatial planes, moving back from a close and almost tactile foreground, through a vertical middle space over which the water flows (and whose vertical axis is both confirmed and measured by the birch trees in the right foreground) and into a deeper space behind the ebbing waterfall. A strong diagonal that runs from near the top left hand corner to the bottom right of the image suggests the course that the flowing water must follow without actually showing us a stream. Milne articulates this satisfying complexity with characteristic economy, using only five colours, none of which is typically used to indicate water (green, brown, grey, black and white).

One of the great pleasures of a major Milne painting such as this one is that we can – with Milne’s aesthetic guidance – meet his challenge to look at a landscape in all its complexity and achieve a new way of understanding what we see. On the one hand, Drying Waterfall presents us with a special place. It is as if we have discovered something singular and intimate. On the other hand, though, and as Milne’s laconic title suggests, the phenomenon that we witness is cyclical and fleeting. The waterfall will be gone soon. The painting is in this way appealingly anti-heroic. Milne does not set himself up as a daring explorer discovering a sublime natural site. He simply sees and depicts what is readily present to the eye. The painting is similarly intimate and quiet. It does not lead us grandly to a stupefying view, but instead revels in the pleasures of close looking.

We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, for contributing the above essay.

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