Sold for: $26,325

PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the Artist
By descent to a Private Collection, Vancouver
Sold sale of Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 15, 2013, lot 103
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Joyce Zemans, Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape / A Retrospective Exhibition, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1981, pages 101 and 104, the related 1943 canvas entitled Castle Towers, Garibaldi Park, in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, reproduced page 103 and listed page 282
Ian M. Thom, Jock Macdonald: Evolving Form, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2014, page 35, the 1943 canvas entitled Castle Towers, Garibaldi Park, in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, reproduced page 36 and listed page 202

EXHIBITED
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape / A Retrospective Exhibition, 1981, traveling in 1981 - 1982 to the Art Gallery of Windsor, Edmonton Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery and Vancouver Art Gallery, the 1943 canvas entitled Castle Towers, Garibaldi Park, catalogue #30
Vancouver Art Gallery, Jock Macdonald: Evolving Form, October 18, 2014 - January 4, 2015, traveling in 2015 to the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Jock Macdonald taught at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts until 1933, when he and Group of Seven painter Frederick Varley formed the British Columbia College of Arts. Both artists painted together at Garibaldi in 1929 and 1934. After their school closed, Macdonald spent several years living simply at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, before returning to Vancouver in 1936 to teach and paint. For the next decade, before he turned to abstraction, the landscape would dominate his work. In the early 1940s Lawren Harris moved to Vancouver, and Macdonald and Harris, who loved the mountains, went on sketching trips together and exchanged ideas about the Transcendental movement and theories from the leading proponents of spiritualism. Macdonald spent the summers of 1942 and 1943 in Garibaldi Park. All of these influences can be seen in stunning works such as this, in which the formal and spiritual merge in the magnificent mountain forms and glowing light. Macdonald exclaimed that the nearby Sphinx Glacier “was the most powerful force I have ever seen outside the mountainous waters of the open Pacific,” and here he found a cosmic oneness with nature.

In the catalogue for the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition Jock Macdonald: Evolving Form, Ian Thom discussed Harris’s influence on Macdonald in reference to the 1943 canvas Castle Towers, Garibaldi Park, in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. He wrote, “It is tempting to look at Macdonald’s mountain paintings from the forties through the lens of Harris’ influence. Certainly, there is a greater clarity and precision in works such as Castle Towers, Garibaldi Park (1943); the colour sense is quite distinct from that seen in earlier works such as The Black Tusk, which were so strongly influenced by Varley, but it remains Macdonald’s colour sense and not Harris’.”

The canvas in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery and this sketch are remarkably similar, with only slight differences in details. Both communicate the majesty of this scene, with its rugged, glaciated mountain range, transcendent layers of blue sky and crystalline atmosphere.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars