Sold for: $35,100

PROVENANCE
Dr. Charles Camsell
The Right Honourable Malcolm MacDonald, British High Commissioner to Canada 1941 ~ 1946, and Mrs. MacDonald
Private Collection, Ontario

Inscribed on verso: "Painted on his first sketching trip to Great Bear Lake for Charles Camsell. Charles Camsell and his companion James Mackintosh Bell were the first recorded wanderers into this area (1900) since Franklin. Dr. Camsell subsequently presented this sketch to his great friends the Right Honourable and Mrs. Malcolm MacDonald as a wedding gift. The first point of land on the right is the site where Gilbert LaBine first discovered uranium in the early 1930s. The shacks in the picture are those of the famous Eldorado mine at the time."

A.Y. Jackson was particularly attracted by the northern Canadian wilderness, and we know that he jumped at the chance to visit Port Radium when his friend Gilbert LaBine, president of Eldorado Mining and Refining, invited him up to sketch in 1938. He flew up in LaBine’s company float plane in the late summer, and produced some remarkable work, including this wonderful panoramic sketch. Fall comes early in the Far North, and the reds and yellows of the foliage in the foreground are typical for September. The buildings in the middle distance are part of the Eldorado mine complex - a valuable source of radium and uranium in the 1930s.

This painting comes with an interesting provenance. Originally owned by Dr. Charles Camsell, an important geologist and Commissioner of the Northwest Territories from 1936 to 1946, he gave it as a wedding present to the Right Honorable Malcolm MacDonald (British High Commissioner to Canada) and his Canadian bride in 1946. This is the first time this fine painting has appeared on the market.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars