Sold for: $67,250

PROVENANCE
Roberts Gallery, Toronto
The Art Emporium, Vancouver, 1976
Private Collection, Edmonton
By descent to the present Private Collection, Edmonton

LITERATURE
Roger Burford Mason, A Grand Eye for Glory: A Life of Franz Johnston, 1998, page 32

[Algoma] is charted on a grand scale, slashed by ravines and canyons through which run rivers, streams and springs broadening into lakes, churning lightly over shoaly places or dropping with a roll and a mist for hundreds of feet.

—F.B. Housser

This dramatic description gives insight into why Algoma was a magnet for Frank Johnston and his fellow members of the Group of Seven. Johnston participated in three of the four Group trips to Algoma, including the first boxcar trip, in fall of 1918. Lawren Harris called it “a rugged, wild land…It was a veritable paradise for the creative adventurer in paint in the Canadian north.”

In this stunning composition, Johnston used a tree trunk stripped of its bark in the centre to anchor the foreground, at the edge of a viewpoint overlooking trees glowing with gorgeous fall colours of bright gold and orange. Beyond, evergreens rise in pointed triangular shapes, mixing with deciduous trees in softer tones of yellow. A strip of pale blue sky above creates a connection to the firmament above the dense growth. Johnston’s fluid brushwork is assured, and his handling of the foreground trees is particularly exquisite, with his textural overlay of bright daubs of paint.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars