Sold for: $28,125

PROVENANCE
Richard J. Pearsall, Toronto
Gift of Richard J. Pearsall, Toronto, in memory of Mrs. V.A. Pearsall and Mr. W.E. Sharpe, to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1979, AGO accession #79149

LITERATURE
Small Picture Exhibition by Members of the Ontario Society of Artists, Art Gallery of Toronto, 1924, titled as Quebec Winter

EXHIBITED
Art Gallery of Toronto, Small Picture Exhibition by Members of the Ontario Society of Artists, November 8 – 22, 1924, titled as Quebec Winter, catalogue #89

A.Y. Jackson’s late winter afternoon view of a red horse-drawn sleigh moving away from the viewer and towards a farmhouse is direct and confident. It encapsulates his relationship with Charlevoix County, a region on the north shore of the St. Lawrence about 60 kilometres downriver from Quebec City. It was an area he visited almost annually for about two decades, from the early 1920s to the early 1940s. Quebec, Winter was painted en plein air with a limited palette - possibly flake white, cadmium yellow, red, ultramarine and raw sienna, plus their secondary and tertiary derivations. In this work Jackson gave a lesson in seeing.

In addition to the communication of his deepening feeling for Charlevoix County, Jackson’s lesson is about the apprehension of a view on a panel executed on the spot, representing visual information through five colours and their mixtures. Jackson’s assured strokes of white, blue and earthy violet render the landscape’s contours, light and shade purely in paint. This work was exhibited at the Small Picture Exhibition by Members of the Ontario Society of Artists in 1924, a time when the Group of Seven was gaining acceptance and its members becoming more distinct from each other.

We thank Gregory Humeniuk, art historian, writer and curator, for contributing the above essay.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars