Exhibition's Artworks

1 - Frederic Edwin Church
Hartford, Connecticut, 1826 – New York, 1900
Niagara Falls, from the American Side
1867
Oil on canvas
The National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

In 1857 Church painted Niagara, his first monumental and panoramic view of Niagara Falls, from the Canadian side, in a horizontal format. That painting established his international reputation as America’s outstanding painter. Niagara Falls was appreciated by the contemporary American critics as fulfilling the role of a national icon. It is not surprising that in essaying the same subject ten years later, having received a lucrative commission from Michael Knoedler, Church chose a vertical format and a different perspective. The view is taken from the touristic Prospect Point, popular with artists since 1821. The artist referred to a sepia-toned photograph of the site that he had hand-coloured in oil. Church evokes the sublime, a sensibility with religious undertones, by the scale of the work, the inclusion of the tiny figures and viewing platform contrasted with the towering falls, the brilliantly captured water spumes and mist dominating virtually the rest of the enormous canvas, and the foreground rainbow rising from the glistening rocks and vegetation.

 

2 - John Ferguson Weir
West Point, New York, 1841 – Providence, Rhode Island, 1926
Niagara Falls
1871
Oil on canvas
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
Gift of Dr. Henry P. Moseley, B.A. 1894

Weir was the son of a professor of drawing at West Point, New York, and the brother of Impressionist painter Julian Alden Weir. His early landscapes reflect the influence of the Hudson River School painters, notably of Church, as is evident here, but his work increasingly was informed by the style and subjects of Impressionist artists.

 

3 - William Notman
Paisley, Scotland, 1826 – Montreal, 1891
The Horseshoe Falls and Terrapin Tower, Niagara, Ontario
1869
Silver salts on glass, wet collodion process (modern contact print from original negative)
McCord Museum, Montreal

From 1816 until 1885, Goat Island was owned by the Porter brothers, who constructed a wooden toll bridge (without railing!) connecting the island to the mainland. For twenty-five cents, tourists could cross the bridge to gain a dramatic view of the falls. At Terrapin Point (Porter’s Bluff), the brothers further constructed a ninety-metre walkway from Goat Island to the crest of the Horseshoe Falls. In 1829, Terrapin Tower was built on the island, atop the rocky promontory at the end of the walkway. For ten cents, visitors could enter and climb up to an observatory balcony, offering a spectacular view. In 1872 the tower was demolished.

 

4 - William Notman
Paisley, Scotland, 1826 – Montreal, 1891
Niagara Falls
1869
Albumen print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

 

5 - William Morris Hunt
Brattleboro, Vermont, 1824 – Appledore Island, Maine, 1879
American Falls, Niagara
1878
Oil on canvas
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Mr. Cecil D. Kaufmann

Hunt’s American Falls, Niagara, taken from Prospect Point, inevitably recalls Church’s rendition of over ten years earlier. In June 1878 Hunt visited the area, and the sight and sound of the falls (today 75 per cent of the water that cascaded over the falls has been diverted for hydroelectric power) inspired him spontaneously to undertake the painting during his month-long holiday, together with several drawings, pastels and other oils. Unlike Church’s painting, however, Hunt’s is intended neither as an evocation of the sublime nor as an expression of the Divine through natural forces. Rather, it is more closely tied with Impressionist concerns with the interplay of light and colour and the rendering of the subject matter with an open brushwork.

6 - Alexander Henderson
Edinburgh, Scotland, 1831 – Montreal, 1913
Niagara
About 1870
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

 

7 - Herman F. Nielson
Winter Landscape (View of Niagara Falls in Winter)
About 1885
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

8 - George Inness
Newburgh, New York, 1825 – Bridge of Allan, Scotland, 1894
Niagara
1893
Oil on canvas
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington
Gift of The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966

Between 1881 and 1893, Inness painted Niagara Falls seven times. His preferred view was from the Canadian side, looking toward the American bank. This large view is distinguished by its prominent inclusion of the smoking chimney of the Bath Island paper mill and the urban, industrial architecture on the far shore. This underlines a fundamental difference between Inness’s interests and those of such artists as Church and early photographers. Inness was interested not in the picturesque, heroic or narrative aspect of the famous site but in rendering a highly personal response based on direct perception.

 

9 - Alvin Langdon Coburn
Boston, 1882 – Rhos-on-Sea, Wales, 1966
Niagara Falls
About 1910
Platinum print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn

In 1910 Coburn returned to the United States from a visit to Ireland but arrived in Buffalo too late to attend the November 4 opening of the great Photo-Secession exhibition, which he had supported, but which Alfred Stieglitz and Max Weber had organized. Coburn took the opportunity to photograph the icy falls, demonstrating the same fascination with the effects of light and grand formal composition that would characterize his 1912 photographs of Yosemite and the Grand Canyon (nos. 50, 180, 182).

 

10 - William Notman
Paisley, Scotland, 1826 – Montreal, 1891
St. Anne Falls, near Quebec
About 1860
Albumen print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

 

12 - William Notman
Paisley, Scotland, 1826 – Montreal, 1891
Natural Steps on the Montmorency near Quebec
About 1860
Albumen print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Notman employed many photographic assistants as well as draftsmen and painters in his highly successful Montreal studio. He also actively photographed paintings for popular distribution, including oils by Cornelius Krieghoff. It is not surprising, therefore, that Montreal painters turned to his photographs for visual reference and compositional sources. This is certainly the case of Otto Jacobi, and his Montmorency River (no. 13) suggests likely reference to a Notman photograph.

 

13 - Otto Reinhold Jacobi
Königsberg, East Prussia, 1812 – Ardoch, North Dakota, 1901
The Montmorency River
1860
Oil on canvas
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City

 

14 - Alexander Henderson
Edinburgh, Scotland, 1831 – Montreal, 1913
Ice Cone, Montmorency Falls
1876
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

Born in Scotland and having settled in Montreal, Henderson came to specialize in photographic images of the Canadian landscape. In 1865 he published his Canadian Views and Studies by an Amateur and he ultimately directed the photographic division of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This photograph of 1876 would become among his most famous, embodying both an iconic image of the Canadian winter and associated leisure activity, and a well-known Quebec natural wonder, popular with tourists. The scale of the figures descending the slope dramatically enhances the cone, set against the background of the frozen falls. The photograph is also a masterwork of its time for its sophisticated tonal range within the remarkable limitations and challenges of the snow scene.

 

15 - Lucius O’Brien
Shanty Bay, Ontario, 1832 – Toronto, 1899
Kakabeka Falls, Kamanistiquia River
1882
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

This painting forms a remarkable and rare Canadian corollary to the ambitions of inspirational grandeur of the American Hudson River School of painters. This powerful work, in which the intensity of the experience of the falls is so remarkably expressed through the brushstrokes and the fulcrum-like focus of the composition, records O’Brien’s visit to Thunder Bay, above Lake Superior, a site synonymous to the contemporary public with the potentialities and promise of the Canadian Northwest.

 

16 - Benjamin Baltzly
Tuscarawas, Ohio, 1835 – Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1883
Cascade on the Hammond (Garnet) River
1871
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

Baltzly was born and raised in Ohio and only moved to Montreal when he was thirty years old. Already a professional photographer, he worked for William Notman beginning in the early 1870s and in 1871 joined Alfred Selwyn’s team for the Geological Survey of Canada. During the expedition in British Columbia, Baltzly documented the land with remarkable enthusiasm, given the extraordinary challenges encountered in exploring often trail-less and impenetrable forests, wild rivers and rugged mountain terrain, carrying bulky wet-collodion-process equipment. Notman, who underwrote the costs for the presence of photographers on these arduous expeditions, appreciated picturesque compositions for his commercial public.

 

17 - Frank Jay Haynes
Saline, Michigan, 1853 – Saline, 1921
Gibbon Falls
About 1885
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

Gibbon Falls is located in Yellowstone National Park. Growing up in Michigan, Haynes developed an early interest in landscapes through chromolithographs of Church’s dramatic paintings. From 1876, Haynes was the photographer for the Northern Pacific Railroad, creating images to encourage tourism and settlement along the rail lines. He was appointed official photographer of Yellowstone in 1884.

 

18 - Albert Bierstadt
Solingen, Germany, 1830 – New York, 1902
Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall
1864
Oil on canvas
Timken Museum of Art, San Diego
The Putnam Foundation

Bierstadt visited Yosemite for the first time in August 1863, completing this idyllic, indeed paradisiacal view in his New York studio the following year. Set against the monumental scale of the falls, the artist and companions, close by their grazing horses, prepare a meal at their camp (nos. 115, 116, 117). The artist’s idyllic sensibility profoundly appealed to the American public in the Union States, in the midst of a crucial and exceedingly bloody year in the Civil War. The painting thus spoke not only to peace and the beauty and nobility of Nature, but also to the sweeping promise of California and, by extension, the Union.

 

19 - Eadweard James Muybridge
Kingston-upon-Thames, England, 1830 – Kingston-upon-Thames, 1904
Pi-Wi-Ack. Valley of the Yosemite
About 1870
Albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Gift of Harvard University

This monumental photograph of the Vernal Falls (which actually drop close to a hundred metres) was taken during Muybridge’s five-month trip to Yosemite in 1867.

 

20 - Martin Johnson Heade
Lumberville, Pennsylvania, 1819 – St. Augustine, Florida, 1904
Approaching Storm, Beach near Newport
About 1861–1862
Oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865

Heade’s treatment of the beach and seascape creates a memorably threatening landscape. The subordinate, indeed paltry presence of Man against the cosmic forces of Nature is underlined by the scale and translucence of the sails on the sea, so that they seem at once to emerge from and dissolve within the palpably dense air. Approaching Storm, Beach near Newport has been interpreted as an evocation of Man’s relation to God, an allegory of the recent Civil War and a Poussin-like observation on Man and Nature. Clearly this painting draws from the Hudson River School’s focus on the spiritual in Nature and the experience of the sublime.

 

21 - Winslow Homer
Boston, 1836 – Prouts Neck, Maine, 1910
The West Wind
1891
Oil on canvas
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts

The West Wind was, by Homer’s own admission, a painting executed as an exercise in browns (as he responded in a note to John La Farge’s hundred-dollar challenge to successfully create such a picture). This mature painting reveals the artist’s creative response to the style and tonalities of the art of James McNeill Whistler and to the compositions of Japanese woodblock prints, Homer never loses contact with the fundamental character of the chosen motif: powerful gales along his beloved Maine coast. While the painting suggests a narrative, it also presents a veristic and vivid image of the forces of Nature, stripped of the reverent sentiment or allegorical poetry of the Hudson River School.

 

22 - Lucius O’Brien
Shanty Bay, Ontario, 1832 – Toronto, 1899
Sunrise on the Saguenay, Cape Trinity
1880
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Royal Canadian Academy of Arts diploma work, deposited by the artist, Toronto, 1880

While rendering a specific site in Quebec, this painting, O’Brien’s Royal Canadian Academy diploma piece, was immediately exhibited at and accessioned by the new National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. It marks a turn in Canadian landscape painting to a more majestic vision of the nation, influenced by the evocation of the sublime in American Hudson River School paintings.

 

23 - Albert Bierstadt
Solingen, Germany, 1830 – New York, 1902
Moat Mountain, Intervale, New Hampshire
About 1862
Oil on paper mounted on canvas
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
Museum purchase, Currier Funds

In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Bierstadt could not travel to the West Coast for painting motifs, as he wished, and instead visited the White Mountains. The natural beauty of this site, popular with tourists, nonetheless inspired him, and he executed many drawings and an oil sketch. Moat Mountain, Intervale, New Hampshire is one of several paintings executed after these studies. While featuring highly detailed vegetation, the modestly scaled painting, notable for its lack of human figures, depicts a broad sweep of landscape. The carefully observed dramatic effects of sunlight striking the pasture in the distance and the extraordinary range of cloud patterns and densities streaming across the sky unite a lyrical pastoral sensibility of cosmic serenity with vivid directness of vision.

 

24 - Aaron Allan Edson
Stanbridge, Quebec, 1846 – Glen Sutton, Quebec, 1888
Glen Sutton
About 1871
Oil on canvas
V.I. Antiques and Fine Art Inc., Montreal

In this early work, Edson reflects the powerful influence of the Hudson River School, but already his objective naturalism is displayed in his treatment of the foreground vegetation and the young figures moving about in the marsh. Edson preferred subjects of the Eastern Townships, the area in which he was born.

 

25 - John Henry Twachtman
Cincinnati, Ohio, 1853 – Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1902
Winter Harmony
About 1890–1900
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of the Avalon Foundation

This winter scene depicts Hemlock Pool in Horseneck Brook on the artist’s estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. Akin to the painting by Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté (no. 26), the artist uses a chevron in the river turn, to draw the viewer’s eye into the depths of the isolated and unpopulated landscape which so dominates the canvas. The influence of Impressionism is evident in the dissolving forms seen through the snowy sky and the reflections of colour tones onto the snow beneath. As has often been commented, the sought emotional response to the canvas is one of meditative calm and serenity, a contrast to the increasingly stressful demands of urban life in nearby New York City.

 

26 - Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté
Arthabaska, Quebec, 1869 – Daytona Beach, Florida, 1937
Bend in the River Gosselin at Arthabaska
About 1906
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Robert A. Snowball Bequest

Suzor-Coté executed this painting in Paris based on studies he made during a winter visit to Canada in 1901–1902. It is a replica of one he successfully exhibited in Paris at the 1906 Salon des Artistes Français. Clearly influenced by his direct experience of Impressionism, the painting is a study of light reflections and muted tonalities beneath a brooding, leaden grey sky. A crisp realism and focus on solid forms distinguish this work from Twachtman’s. The relatively low perspective, in which the horizon is set on the top quarter of the canvas, projects monumentality upon the snow-covered terrain and partly frozen river, an effect enhanced by the fact that the landscape is bereft of any figures.

 

27 - Thomas Worthington Whittredge
Springfield, Ohio, 1820 – Summit, New Jersey, 1910
Woods of Ashokan
1868
Oil on canvas
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia
Gift of Mr. Edward J. Brickhouse

Set in the Catskill Mountains of New York State, this visionary scene of virgin Nature clearly demonstrates Whittredge’s debt to Hudson River School painters. The autumnal view and its lighting suggest the course of human life in an elegiac and spiritual mode, a legacy of the artist’s early study at the Düsseldorf Academy.

 

28 - Sanford Robinson Gifford
Greenfield, New York, 1823 – New York, 1880
October in the Catskills
1880
Oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. Douglas Pardee, Mr. and Mrs. John McGreevey and Mr. and Mrs. Charles C. Shoemaker

The Kaaterskill Clove is a gorge near Palenville in the Catskill Mountains, a site close to Gifford’s mother’s home and beloved by Hudson River School painters. Here, the artist returned to a panoramic view he had essayed in 1862. This later work is a study of the palpable atmosphere of a late autumnal day. The work primarily addresses, in personal terms, the spiritual implications of Nature and Divine promise. Gifford has altered the landscape, dissolving the contours of the horizon and stressing the isolated centrality of the symbol-laden, dazzling sun.

 

29 - Aaron Allan Edson
Stanbridge, Quebec, 1846 – Glen Sutton, Quebec, 1888
Primeval Forest
1870s
Oil on canvas
Collection of Victor Isganaitis, Montreal

Despite his appreciation of the Hudson River School and the evocative title of the work, Edson approaches his subject with a far more trenchant naturalistic sensibility than Whittredge or the artists associated with that painting’s style. The seemingly arbitrary cropping (the composition is actually carefully balanced by the wedge of the fallen trees and the central white birches) suggests the character of photography and the spontaneity of a watercolour sketch.

 

30 - Benjamin Baltzly
Tuscarawas, Ohio, 1835 – Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1883
Forest Trees on the North Thompson River, 165 Miles above Kamloops
1871
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

The photograph makes a striking comparison with the aesthetic of the preceding Edson.
See also Baltzly’s Cascade on the Hammond (Garnet) River (no. 16).

 

31 - Homer Ransford Watson
Doon, Ontario, 1855 – Doon, 1936
A Coming Storm in the Adirondacks
1879
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Gift of George Hague

Watson was another artist whose early years were spent working in the photographic studios of William Notman, in this case in Toronto. His training, however, was profoundly enriched by work in the United States between 1876 and 1877, during which he became acquainted with the Hudson River School. Watson also held John Constable’s landscape painting in high regard. Thus, it is no surprise that a certain Romanticism suffuses his paintings.

 

32 - John Frederick Kensett
Cheshire, Connecticut, 1816 – New York, 1872
Lake George
1869
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Bequest of Maria DeWitt Jesup, from the collection of her husband, Morris K. Jesup, 1914

This renowned masterpiece is of an Adirondack subject Kensett returned to on many occasions between about 1850 and 1872. Kensett himself considered the painting particularly important. The power of its scale is all the more enhanced by the simplicity of the composition. The setting is the western prospect of Crown Island, with Mount Erebus gently rising in the distance. The sole human figure is a Native American in a canoe serenely passing the rocky up-cropping at the left—a nostalgic inclusion, since Indigenous populations had long since virtually disappeared from the region. In its restriction of palette, its refined, subtle tonal ranges and its emphasis on palpable, atmospheric lighting, this composition, despite its monumental scale, is fundamentally a private and meditational image.

 

33 - Carleton E. Watkins
Oneonta, New York, 1829 – Imola, California, 1916
Fallen Leaf Lake, Looking South
1860s
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

In his views of the West, including Yosemite, dating to the 1860s and 1870s, Watkins endeavoured to present panoramas that evoked virgin Nature, a wilderness with Divine promise ready for human penetration. This photograph is remarkable for its controlled tonal range, the focus upon the effects of light and its reflections, the simple contours of the landscape, the chosen perspective expressing a serene natural order, and the personal apprehension of Nature’s transcendent beauty. This approach differed from the more dramatic photographic ambitions commonly evident in the works of Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson.

 

34 - William Henry Jackson
Keeseville, New York, 1843 – New York, 1942
The Upper Twin Lake, Sawatch Range
1873
Albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Museum purchase, ex-collection Charles Carruth

As part of his exploratory work for the Hayden Geological Survey in July 1873, Jackson and his team travelled to the Arkansas River and the Twin Lakes, with the Colorado Rockies rising in the background, sensitive to both the panoramas and the geological formations. This image was shot on July 26 at an elevation of about 2,800 metres. The site already featured a “house of entertainment,” as Jackson described it, and was popular for lake fishing. Typically, the artist included a human figure to set the scale of the landscape and enhance its monumental effect.

 

35 - Benjamin Baltzly
Tuscarawas, Ohio, 1835 – Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1883
Selkirk Mountains as Seen from the Top of the Mountains near the Confluence of the Blue and North Thompson Rivers
1871
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

This remarkably atmospheric and evocative image is another one of the photographs taken by the artist in 1871 while working in British Columbia for the Geological Survey of Canada under the supervision of Alfred Selwyn (see nos.16 and 30). Baltzly’s costs were underwritten by William Notman, who appreciated the commercial possibilities.

 

36 - Charles George Horetzky
Edinburgh, Scotland, 1838 – Toronto, 1900
Canadian Pacific Railway Survey, Roche à Miette
1872
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

Between 1871 and 1881 Horetzky worked as a photographer for the Canadian Pacific Railway Survey, accompanying teams on the northern Rockies route. In 1872, the year of this photograph, he served as guide to Sanford Fleming, who had been hired by the Canadian government to survey for a rail link between the East and Pacific Coast. Fleming played a major role in Canadian history. Not only did he survey and map the West, he also served as an engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway in its westward program and created universal standard time, crucial for train scheduling. Pictured here is the Athabasca River Valley at the entrance of Jasper Park and the Rockies. A human figure sets the scale.

 

37 - William Notman and Son
Victoria Glacier and Lake Louise, near Laggan, Alberta
1889
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

By 1889 the Canadian Pacific Railway was already promoting Lake Louise as a tourist destination. The following year Swiss guides were introduced to encourage upper-class visitors to venture to the Canadian “Alps.” Notman worked closely with the Railway in developing markets for his photographic archives.

 

38 - John Arthur Fraser
London, 1838 – New York, 1898
At the Rogers Pass, Summit of the Selkirk Range, British Columbia
1886
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

With its crisp outlines in the foreground and generalized details in the middle and distant landscape, Fraser’s imposing view of this Rockies panorama is clearly indebted to the images obtained by contemporary photography. Indeed, the treatment of the generalized forms may well reflect his reliance on a specific photograph. Alexander Henderson’s photographs, in particular, had previously served the artist as subject and compositional references. At the Rogers Pass, Summit of the Selkirk Range, British Columbia is one of the few Rocky Mountain oil paintings by the artist (see no. 42). The perspective suggests the view a traveller might have from a railcar.

 

39 - Frederick Marlett Bell-Smith
London, 1846 – Toronto, 1923
Coming Storm in the Rockies
1914
Oil on canvas
Collection Power Corporation of Canada

In 1914 Bell-Smith journeyed on the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway to Prince Rupert. Travelling on the northern route through Yellowhead Pass provided him with new, dramatic subjects. During the years leading up to the First World War, the artist often visited the Rockies and the Pacific Coast, producing paintings for which there was a constant demand. Bell-Smith, who had worked as a photographer between 1867 and 1871 as well as an illustrator during the 1870s and 1880s, was particularly appreciated for his views of mountains and glaciers with mists and cloud effects.

 

40 - William Henry Jackson
Keeseville, New York, 1843 – New York, 1942
Pike’s Peak from the Garden of the Gods
About 1880
Albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Gift of Harvard University

 

41 - William Henry Jackson
Keeseville, New York, 1843 – New York, 1942
Pike’s Peak from the Garden of the Gods
1888
Albumen print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Purchased through a gift of the Judy Kay Memorial Fund

Jackson’s 1880s photographs reflect his outreach to a market hungry for large, panoramic images of great American landscapes. Painted cycloramas dated back to 1785 and were used to present such historical events as the Battle of Gettysburg (Paul Philippoteaux’s hundred-metre-long, eight-metre-high painting, exhibited in Chicago in 1883). At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Charles Close would mount a monumental 360-degree, electrically driven cyclorama. With the advent of the Cirkut camera at the turn of the twentieth century, a single panoramic view could be captured on one long, continuously exposed large-format film. The Jackson photographs, however, were created through many individual images attached end to end.

 

42 - John Arthur Fraser
London, 1838 – New York, 1898
Mount Baker from Stave River, at the Confluence with the Fraser on Line of CPR
1886
Oil on canvas
Glenbow Museum, Calgary

This work is based on a watercolour sketch the artist made during a visit to the site in 1886, sponsored by the Canadian Pacific Railway. The painting is remarkable for its natural yet luminous colourism, which establishes the depth of field, presenting precisely the sort of majestic view that appealed to Sir William Van Horne and the CPR officers. The directness of impression and vibrant tones reflect Fraser’s dependence on the sketch and his own memory of the experience, while the seemingly arbitrary cropping at the right and left suggests that he also referred to a photograph.

 

43 - Albert Bierstadt
Solingen, Germany, 1830 – New York, 1902
Passing Storm over the Sierra Nevadas
1870
Oil on canvas
San Antonio Museum of Art
Purchased with funds from the Robert J. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation

Bierstadt had last visited the West in 1863 and would depart for a two-year sojourn in California in 1871 to revitalize his visual repertoire. Nonetheless this painting from 1870 retains a remarkably vivid character. Fascinatingly, the artist includes no trace of humanity in this vision of virgin Nature, neither Europeans nor Native Americans; indeed, it is pure landscape. The sunlight penetrating through the passing clouds onto the mountain peaks of this sublime American vista clearly conveys the message of Divine promise and benediction upon a great nation in the wake of the horrors of the Civil War. It is noteworthy that Bierstadt’s brother, Charles, was a photographic innovator who also travelled West and that Carleton E. Watkins’s early photographs of the West, dating from 1861, encouraged the artist to undertake his first trip to California and Yosemite in 1863.

 

44 - Carleton E. Watkins
Oneonta, New York, 1829 – Imola, California, 1916
Mt. Lola, Looking towards Lake Tahoe
About 1880
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

Watkins’s photograph of the Sierra Nevada range provides both a sweeping panorama and the geological aspects of the area. In 1879 he was commissioned to photograph Mount Lola and Round Top for George Davidson of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.

 

45 - Eadweard James Muybridge
Kingston-upon-Thames, England, 1830 – Kingston-upon-Thames, 1904
Tenaya Canyon, Valley of the Yosemite, from Union Point
About 1868
Albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Gift of Virginia Adams

This is one of several views taken by the artist during his 1867 expedition to Yosemite (see no. 19). The dark forested heights of the foreground set against the sunlit granite cliff of the middleground establish a wedge through which the viewer peers to the distant peak. Meticulously composed, the image seeks to evade the theatricality of Bierstadt’s works.

 

46 - John K. Hillers
Hannover, Germany, 1843 – Washington, 1925
View up Yosemite, with El Capitan on the Left and the Three Brothers on the Right
About 1891–1892
Albumen print
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Gift of Luc LaRochelle

Hillers gained his reputation as a photographer when he joined Major John Wesley Powell’s second expedition of the Rocky Mountain range (encompassing northern Arizona and the Grand Canyon, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming) in 1872. Rapidly mastering photographic technique, he became a leading photographer in the federally commissioned Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region and succeeding expeditions through 1879. Hillers continued to record sites until 1893, after which, limited by health, he turned to developing his negatives in his studio in Washington, where he worked for the United States Geological Survey until 1908. This photograph probably dates from his last expedition in the early 1890s.

 

47 - Albert Bierstadt
Solingen, Germany, 1830 – New York, 1902
Yosemite Valley
1868
Oil on canvas
Oakland Museum of California
Gift of Miss Marguerite Laird in memory of Mr. and Mrs. P. W. Laird

The Yosemite Valley was a subject Bierstadt would repeatedly paint. Impressed with Carleton Watkins’s photographs of the region, exhibited in New York in 1862, he visited Yosemite for the first time in 1863 and began producing various oils the following year. Initial reaction to his first monumental panorama, executed in 1865, was one of scepticism, as critics questioned the veracity of the composition, accusing the artist of magniloquence and of creating “monstrous stage scenery,” and attacked the melodramatic character of the work. Returning to the theme in 1868, the artist’s Edenic view of the valley (Bierstadt himself referred to the site, in 1863, as a Garden of Eden), was probably completed in Rome. No human trespasses into this vision of virgin Nature, both Native American and European presence eliminated in a rhapsodic vision of a primeval splendour.

 

48 - Thomas Moran
Bolton, England, 1837 – Santa Barbara, California, 1926
Mountain of the Holy Cross
1875
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Autry National Center of the American West, Museum of the American West Collection, Los Angeles
Donated by Mr. and Mrs. Gene Autry. Gilded frame, 1995, by Gold Leaf Studios, Washington; frame acquisition made possible by Clyde E. Tritt with generous underwriting from Ambassador and Mrs. Glen Holden

There could hardly be imagined a more consciously inspirational image drawn from Nature than Moran’s masterpiece, Mountain of the Holy Cross. The actual peak rises over 4,200 metres in central Colorado and exhibits the feature of a Latin cross on its south flank created by two intersecting courses of granite. With a stem over 450 metres long, the cross embodies a snow depth of between fifteen and thirty metres, and is visible throughout the year. The mountain had first been mapped by the Hayden Geological Survey team in 1873. Moran, who accompanied the Survey the following year with the express intent of making a “pilgrimage” to the mountain, was the first to artistically exploit its symbolism, creating an emblematic image of human aspiration toward spiritual fulfillment. While the composition guides the eye ever upward toward the peak, a halo-like ring of clouds circles the cross, beckoning at a great distance. Mountain of the Holy Cross speaks to the Divine promise and benediction upon the future of a nation so recently and bloodily divided.

 

49 - Thomas Moran
Bolton, England, 1837 – Santa Barbara, California, 1926
Grand Canyon with Rainbow
1912
Oil on canvas
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Gill through the Patrons of Art and Music

Moran’s attempts to evoke the experience of the sublime in the landscape of the West are perhaps most famously asserted in his many views of the Grand Canyon. The artist had first visited the site in 1873 with the Powell expedition. The previous year, his images of Yellowstone, together with Hayden’s survey reports, had secured Congress’s establishment there of the first national park. Moran returned to the theme of the Grand Canyon throughout his career, and some of the resulting works were commissioned by railway companies to promote tourism. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company began using his compositions in their publicity as early as 1877 and paid the artist, along with photographer William Henry Jackson, for a week-long expedition there in 1892.

 

50 - Alvin Langdon Coburn
Boston, 1882 – Rhos-on-Sea, Wales, 1966
The Amphitheatre, Grand Canyon
1912
Platinum print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn

Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, Coburn had been a close associate of Alfred Stieglitz and a supporter of the Photo-Secessionist movement. In September 1911, he ventured to the Grand Canyon accompanied by a guide and executed photographs from its rims and along the rough trails to its base. Despite the deprivations, he was inspired by what he described as the “isolated and awful grandeur … under the glory of the stars.” This platinum print in which the tonality of the medium enhances the soaring effect, is a magnificent study of the Canyon in the raking sunlight, creating monumental blocks in a remarkably abstract compositional order.

 

51 - Timothy O’Sullivan
New York, 1840 – New York, 1882
A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
1863
Albumen print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Gift of Phyllis Lambert, Montreal, 1975

The carnage of the Civil War is hard to imagine, even by modern standards: over 360,000 deaths and about 275,000 wounded among Union forces of 2,200,000; and over 258,000 deaths and 137,000 wounded among Confederate forces of 1,064,000, with an American population of roughly 30,000,000 in 1860. The Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) was the turning point in the northern advance of Confederate troops—at the cost of 23,000 casualties on each side. Photography brought these horrors to a concerned public with a new and unflinching verity. This devastating landscape of the Confederate dead that seems to stretch to infinity was to be one of the most famous images of the conflict. Among the poignant details are the missing shoes and the litter from the pockets about the corpses, witness to the “harvesting” by survivors.

 

52 - Alexander Gardner
Paisley, Scotland, 1821 – Washington, 1882
Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg
1863
Albumen print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Gift of Phyllis Lambert, Montreal, 1975

While esteemed for his trenchant portraits, notably of Lincoln, and his battlefield images, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg is apparently a contrived photograph. Modern scholarship has shown that Gardner used the same body of a Confederate sniper in multiple locations and likely set the poses himself.

 

53 - George Barnard
Coventry, Connecticut, 1819 – Cedarville, New York, 1902
Rebel Works in Front of Atlanta, Georgia, No. 1
1864
Albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Museum purchase; ex-collection Philip Medicus

Barnard, a New Englander, had travelled through the South in his youth. As a Union Army photographer, he was sent to such early Civil War sites as Harper’s Ferry and Bull Run, Virginia, and in 1863 was commissioned to lead the military division’s photographic operations at Nashville. After the fall of Atlanta in the autumn of 1864, Barnard collected images of the fortifications and state of the city, then followed General Sherman’s troops to Savannah. He continued his work through 1865 and into 1866, documenting Sherman’s path from Tennessee to Atlanta and Savannah, and then through South Carolina.

 

55 - Joseph Rusling Meeker
Newark, New Jersey, 1827 – St. Louis, Missouri, 1887
The Land of Evangeline
1874
Oil on canvas
Saint Louis Art Museum
Gift of Mrs. Wright Prescott Edgerton in memory of Dr. and Mrs. W. T. Helmuth by exchange

The subject of this painting is an episode from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s extended narrative poem “Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie.” That work is a haunting and mournful story of separated lovers and their search for each other, a totally fictional romantic account of the actual ruthless and tragic deportation of the indigenous French population of Acadia (encompassing Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) by the British forces during the French and Indian Wars. The highly popular poem about loss and spiritual redemption became so entrenched in the minds of Acadians that the story was commonly believed to be true well into the twentieth century. Meeker depicts the moment when Evangeline, seeking her beloved Gabriel in the dense and exotic Louisiana bayous, rests beneath cypresses (associated with death), the trees creating an embracing bower about her, receiving a vision of hope that lightens her heart and raises her spirits.

 

56 - Cornelius Krieghoff
Amsterdam, 1815 – Chicago, 1872
Chippewa Indians at Lake Huron
1864
Oil on canvas
Collection Power Corporation of Canada

Krieghoff specialized in pictures of French Canadian and Aboriginal life in Quebec, making a virtual industry of his successful enterprise for an avid Canadian market, particularly in Quebec and Ontario. The artist painted no less than twenty-three versions of this painting, albeit with minor variations, showing a group of Chippewa hunters preparing a recently killed caribou. The rock formation itself appears in other Krieghoff compositions.

 

57 - Charles George Horetzky
Edinburgh, Scotland, 1838 – Toronto, 1900
Jasper House Valley Looking South
1872
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

To capture images in the bitter cold of winter, Horetzky used prepared dry collodion plates, a technique developed at this time. This image from Alberta is notable for its respectful and documentary approach to its subject.

 

58 - William Raphael
Nakel, Prussia, 1833 – Montreal, 1914
Indian Encampment on the Lower St. Lawrence
1879
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Royal Canadian Academy of Arts diploma work, deposited by the artist, Montreal, 1880

First exhibited in Toronto in 1879, this moonlit landscape, often described by critics as mysterious, combines seemingly disparate and discordant elements: the foreground settlement and figures in the canoe, the beacon-light and the house on the cliff create an open narrative, in which the presence of Aboriginal people primarily serves an anecdotal role and contributes to the dark and romantic mood.

 

59 - Henry John Sandham
Montreal, 1842 – London, 1910
On an Eastern Salmon Stream
About 1874
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

In 1872 Sandham exhibited seven figurative oils, all featuring Aboriginal people, as well as landscape watercolours with small figures. Railroad expansion also encouraged the artist to seek venues afield from Montreal. In 1873 he travelled to Chaleur Bay in New Brunswick. This painting features one of these eastern salmon streams, the Restigouche River, on the border between Quebec and New Brunswick, with an encampment of teepees in the distance. Salmon fishing had become a male leisure sports activity in an increasingly urbanized society and the encampment nostalgically alludes to a pre-modern, primeval age.

 

60 - Thomas Worthington Whittredge
Springfield, Ohio, 1820 – Summit, New Jersey, 1910
Indian Encampment
Between 1870 and 1876
Oil on canvas
Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, Chicago

Born in Ohio, Whittredge received extensive artistic training in Düsseldorf and Rome before opening a studio in New York in 1859. In 1865–1866 and 1870 he travelled west to the Rocky Mountains in the company of Sanford Gifford and John Frederick Kensett. This painting resulted from the second trip. Structured with carefully controlled ranges of tone and light, it reflects a cool realist sensibility, without narrative interplay, that parallels photographic images. The foreground details are in crisp clarity and the vast panorama of the foothills and distant Rockies displays the artist’s sense for vast spaces. Whittredge responded more to the immense expanses of the plains than to the monumental Rockies, creating landscapes animated by passing moments of Native American experience stripped of allegory or artificial heroics.

 

61 - William Notman
Paisley, Scotland, 1826 – Montreal, 1891
Indian Camp, Blackfoot Reserve, near Calgary, Alberta
1889
Silver salts on glass, gelatin dry plate process (modern contact print from original glass plate negative)
McCord Museum, Montreal

 

62 - Edward Sheriff Curtis
Whitewater, Wisconsin, 1868 – Los Angeles, 1952
Flathead Camp on Jocko River, Reservation in Western Montana by the Rockie Mountains
1911
Photogravure no 232, The North American Indian, supplementary portfolio to vol. 7
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

After establishing himself in Seattle in 1887, Curtis focused his photographic career on recording the lives of Native American peoples. In 1901 he conceived of the major opus of his career: a documentary record of the diverse Native tribes of North America, their lifestyles, dwellings, customs and religious activities, along with a series of ethnographically oriented individual portraits. Encouraged by President Roosevelt and supported by financier J. P. Morgan, Curtis produced a handsome twenty-volume series of texts and portfolios between 1907 and 1930 entitled The North American Indian. In seeking to record these vanishing cultures, he took over forty thousand images of over eighty tribes and made cylinder recordings of languages and music. In the end, fifteen hundred photogravure illustrations and over seven hundred large photogravures were published. While the series has been criticized as mythologizing its subjects and embodying the prejudicial European view of the “Indian” as “noble savage,” the images nonetheless are invaluable records of disappearing living cultures and are of great artistic merit as photographic compositions.

 

63 - Edward Sheriff Curtis
Whitewater, Wisconsin, 1868 – Los Angeles, 1952
[Sioux Warriors] at Sheep Mountain in the Badlands of Pine Ridge Reservations, South Dakota
1908
Photogravure no 119, The North American Indian, supplementary portfolio to vol. 3
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

The figures in this famous image, shot on the reservation, were undoubtedly asked to pose with war bonnets.

 

64 - Timothy O’Sullivan
New York, 1840 – New York, 1882
Ancient Ruins in the Canyon de Chelle, New Mexico
1873
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

In 1871 O’Sullivan joined the Wheeler geological survey, a series of expeditions west of the hundredth meridian which would result in a multi-volume report, issued between 1875 and 1887. While the photographer exploited the pictorial possibilities of the sites, Lieutenant George Wheeler, focusing on the practical aspects of the survey to encourage future development, captioned the images. In 1873 O’Sullivan, accompanied by a small group, travelled to a Zuni pueblo (or dwelling) in Northeast Arizona and onward to the so-called White House Ruins—an Anasazi pueblo mostly dating from the eleventh century nestled into the walls of Canyon de Chelle on Navaho land. Capturing the view at a significant distance, he cropped the image to encapsulate the ruins, located in a niche about fifteen metres above the base, and the dramatically lit sandstone walls. Small figures standing among the ruins at the base lend scale to this unforgettable and monumental view.

 

65 - Edward Sheriff Curtis
Whitewater, Wisconsin, 1868 – Los Angeles, 1952
Mishongnovi Village Showing a Comprehensive View of This Middle Mesa Pueblo
1900
Photogravure no 425, The North American Indian, supplementary portfolio to vol. 12
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

 

66 - Edward Sheriff Curtis
Whitewater, Wisconsin, 1868 – Los Angeles, 1952
A Mamalelekala Chief’s Mortuary House
1914
Photogravure, The North American Indian, vol. 10, facing p. 52
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

 

67 - Edward Sheriff Curtis
Whitewater, Wisconsin, 1868 – Los Angeles, 1952
A Wishham Spearing Salmon with a Double Pointed Spear
1911
Photogravure no 276, The North American Indian, supplementary portfolio to vol. 8
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

 

68 - Emily Carr
Victoria 1871 – Victoria 1945
Totem by the Ghost Rock
1912
Oil on canvas
Vancouver Art Gallery
Emily Carr Trust

In 1912, travelling up the coast north of Vancouver with Clara and William Russ, Carr visited several villages in Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands), executing watercolours to record her impressions. Fascinated with the principles of Haida design and appreciative of the dynamic naturalism and careful observation underlying animal imagery, she created works which, while documenting the totems, also spoke to her own modernist and subjective interpretations of them. She first executed the composition as a large watercolour and then developed the painting in her studio, eliminating some elements and applying the Fauvist palette she had adopted during her studies in France. The composition depicts the far end of the village of Q’una near a cliffside containing burial sites and considered haunted; thus the title of the work.

 

70 - Emily Carr
Victoria 1871 – Victoria 1945
Indian War Canoe (Alert Bay)
1912
Oil on panel
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Purchase, gift of A. Sidney Dawes

Executed in her studio, the painting has a note written by the artist on its verso stating, “Indian war canoe taken at Alert Bay during a potlatch.” The painting is based on a 1908 watercolour sketch executed on Alert Bay, a small island between North Vancouver Island and the mainland. At the time, the canoe was installed at the entrance to the village. Carr’s Fauvist palette conjoins with her interest and esteem for the Native American heritages, as she sensitively renders the forms and decorative schemes of the vessel.

 

71 - Frances Anne Hopkins
London, 1838 – London, 1918
Shooting the Rapids
1879
Oil on canvas
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

This Hopkins masterpiece is among her largest and most dramatic canvases. The work depicts an actual event. Seated at centre in their Victorian finery are Edward Hopkins, with his reddish beard and distinctive hat, the artist herself, fashionably attired with her modish bonnet, a man in bow tie and jacket, probably Alexander Grant Dallas, former Governor of Rupert’s Land, and another figure visible only by his straw hat. In June 1863 the Hudson’s Bay Company was acquired by the International Finance Society. Wishing to re-examine the company’s fur trade, one of the trustees, Edward Watkin, met with Dallas, then Governor of Rupert’s Land, on behalf of the board in Montreal. There, they agreed to travel to the Red River Settlement in the Governor’s canoe manned by, as Watkin described, “eleven stalwart Indians, almost all six feet high.” On July 23, 1863 the two Hopkinses, Watkin and Dallas canoed from Lachine to Montreal. This trip down the Lachine Rapids formed the basis of the painting.

 

72 - Charles Jones Way
Dartmouth, England, 1835 – Lausanne, Switzerland, 1919
Landscape with Indians
1871–1872
Oil on canvas
Vancouver Art Gallery
Annie M. Mack Bequest Fund

Born and trained in England, Way immigrated to Canada, settling in Montreal. There he worked with William Notman, who photographed some of his paintings. Typical of Way’s romantic and picturesque depictions of landscapes and Native peoples, European hunter-explorers in their proper Western clothing are juxtaposed with their Native guide, shown kneeling with his back to us preparing the campfire.

 

73 - Frederick Arthur Verner
Sheridan, Ontario, 1836 – London, 1928
Buffaloes on the Canadian Prairies
1885
Oil on canvas
McCord Museum, Montreal
Gift of Mr. A. Sidney Dawes

One of the most captivating aspects of this picture by Verner, an artist who specialized in animal paintings and watercolours, is that it was executed six years after the last buffaloes were recorded in Canada, which explains the brooding character of the sky and colour range of a modest herd disappearing into the distance. Verner had first travelled from Toronto to Manitoba in 1873 and his studies of the plains’ broad spaces served him as references for many years, also encouraging his interest in Native populations. He could not have seen free herds of buffaloes at that time, however. By the time he travelled farther west in 1890, buffaloes were on the verge of extinction. In its way, the painting constitutes a Canadian corollary to Bierstadt’s celebrated The Last of the Buffalo, painted three years later.

 

74 - Stanley J. Morrow
Richland County, Ohio, 1843 – Dallas, 1921
Gen’l Custer’s Last Stand, Looking in Direction of Ford and Indian Village
About 1876
Stereoscopic photograph
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

In its aftermath, the public fascination with the Battle of Little Bighorn, commonly known as Custer’s Last Stand, could not be exaggerated. The Seventh Cavalry was detested and attacked by the joined forces of the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, led by Sitting Bull, on June 25–26, 1876, in the eastern Montana territory, resulting in the annihilation of General George Armstrong Custer’s column of two hundred ten men. In overall forces, the warriors outnumbered the soldiers by three to one (about eighteen hundred to six hundred). Custer, whose vanity, ego and ambition were renowned, led his troops into open and unfamiliar terrain, and the situation was exacerbated by the earlier prudent retreat of Major Reno’s initial attacking force. The initial public reaction, brought to a fury by sensationalist news coverage, was devastating toward Native populations. Only in the later twentieth century did a general appreciation of the mistreatments of Native populations and the negative operations of the United States Cavalry come to be recognized.

 

75 - Stanley J. Morrow
Richland County, Ohio, 1843 – Dallas, 1921
The Monument on Custer’s Hill, Containing the Bones on the Field
About 1876
Stereoscopic photograph, albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

In its aftermath, the public fascination with the Battle of Little Bighorn, commonly known as Custer’s Last Stand, could not be exaggerated. The Seventh Cavalry was detested and attacked by the joined forces of the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, led by Sitting Bull on June 25–26, 1876, in the eastern Montana territory, resulting in the annihilation of General George Armstrong Custer’s column of two hundred ten men. In overall forces, the warriors outnumbered the soldiers by three to one (about eighteen hundred to six hundred). Custer, whose vanity, ego and ambition were renowned, led his troops into open and unfamiliar terrain, and the situation was exacerbated by the earlier prudent retreat of Major Reno’s initial attacking force. The initial public reaction, brought to a fury by sensationalist news coverage, was devastating toward Native populations. Only in the later twentieth century did a general appreciation of the mistreatments of Native populations and the negative operations of the United States Cavalry come to be recognized.

 

76 - Trager and Kuhn
Big Foot’s Camp after the Battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota
1891
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

On December 29, 1890, about three hundred Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Sioux (Lakota) were attacked by five hundred troops of the Seventh Cavalry under Colonel James Forsyth, using four Hotchkiss guns. The battle started over a hearing-impaired Lakota requesting payment for his weapon, not having understood his people’s agreement to surrender. In the resultant confusion, twenty-five soldiers were shot (mostly from friendly fire) and over one hundred fifty Sioux, including women and children, were immediately killed while others fled into the bitter cold, resulting in further deaths from hypothermia. Preludes to the massacre were manifold: the December 15 murder of Chief Sitting Bull at his cabin by the Indian Police, who had arrested him on government orders; the dislocation to Wounded Knee Creek on December 28 at the order of the Cavalry, whose General was upset over the recent celebration of the Ghost Dance, which had been misinterpreted as a War Dance; and the rumour among the Lakota that they would be taken to a worse detention camp, where they would starve to death. Native food rations were also cut by half. This image shows the Lakota camp after the massacre, moccasins of the dead visible at the edge of the covering blanket.

 

77 - Laton Alton Huffman
Castalia, Iowa, 1854 – Billings, Montana, 1931
Working a Small Herd
About 1890
Albumen print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Purchased through a gift of the Judy Kay Memorial Fund

Huffman’s life is reflected in his photographic subjects. The artist began his career as a photographer working in his father’s studio in Iowa. However, early in his life he also worked in the frontier as a wrangler and became comfortable with the life of the cowboy. By 1880 he had settled in Montana, establishing his studio at Fort Keogh. He supplemented the income he gained from his photographs as a guide to hunting parties and eventually established a cattle ranch of his own.

 

78 - Cornelius Krieghoff
Amsterdam, 1815 – Chicago, 1872
Royal Mail Crossing the St. Lawrence
About 1860
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Krieghoff, who specialized in popular Quebec genre subjects, painted at least six versions of this theme between 1859 and 1862. It is a remarkable anecdotal image of human struggle against ice floes and blockages on the upper St. Lawrence River. The surprising number of figures is explained by the fact that, during the winter, voyagers between Quebec City, located on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, and Lévis, on the south, travelled aboard the Royal Mail canoes. The boatmen commonly pushed the canoes over ice floes. One woman passenger is seen holding her lap dog.

 

79 - William Bradford
Fairhaven, Massachusetts, 1823 – New York, 1892
An Incident of Whaling
Undated
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Bequest of DeLancy Thorn Grant, in memory of her mother, Louise Floyd-Jones Thorn, 1990

Bradford’s passionate interest in the difficult lives and careers of the men centred about the Arctic was reflected in many of his paintings. In this undated work, probably completed after 1869, the artist mixed motifs from diverse sketches and photographic references, as was his custom. The ship trapped in the ice floes and the small figures of the whalers are contrasted against the solidity and scale of the iceberg.

 

80 - John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson (under the supervision of William Bradford)
The Glacier as Seen Forcing Itself Down over the Land and into the Waters of the Fiord
Plate 32 from Bradford’s The Arctic Regions (London, 1873)
Albumen print
University of Calgary, Arctic Institute of North America and Special Collections

Of his nine trips to the Arctic, Bradford’s visit in 1869 proved to be the most important. Over the course of four months, he travelled along the Labrador coast and out to Greenland, encountering icebergs, polar bears, whalers, sealers and Inuit. Two Boston photographers, John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson, who worked directly under Bradford’s supervision, executed most of the images. One hundred forty-one albumen print photographs were employed in his deluxe book The Arctic Regions, published in London in 1873. While Bradford took many sketches during the expedition, several of which were published in the book, he confirmed that he later found the photographs indispensable in executing his paintings. Interestingly, however, the artist never directly repeated any of the photographs as a painting composition.

 

81 - Cornelius Krieghoff
Amsterdam, 1815 – Chicago, 1872
Indian Hunter and His Family
1856
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Mary Fry Dawson Bequest

This image of an Aboriginal family in winter, the husband venturing out in his snowshoes to hunt, appears to be situated in the district of Lake Beauport, a mountainous area just north of Quebec City in the Laurentians.

 

82 - Winslow Homer
Boston, 1836 – Prouts Neck, Maine, 1910
A Huntsman and Dogs
1891
Oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The William L. Elkins Collection, 1924

A Huntsman and Dogs comes out of Homer’s own experience in the northern Adirondack woods. As in other works of the artist’s later period, the structure of the composition is strongly influenced by the Japanese colour woodblock prints of Hokusai, evident in the diagonal mountain profile against the foreground figure of the returning huntsman, his head silhouetted against the sky, and the cropping of the right edge of the canvas just beyond the mountain peak. The cold, unsentimentalized view of the rough rural hunter, with his baying dogs and a deer carcass slung over his shoulder, seemed harsh to contemporary viewers. One critic attacked the painter for his treatment of the huntsman as “low and brutal in the extreme,” as a “sort of scoundrel … who hounds deer to death up in the Adirondacks for the couple of dollars the hide and horns bring in.”

 

83 - Charles George Horetzky
Edinburgh, Scotland, 1838 – Toronto, 1900
Indian Suspension Bridge over the Wotsonqua River
1872
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

This site is in British Columbia. Horetzky ceased working for the Canadian Pacific Railway Survey in 1881, after persistent arguments with management regarding proposed rail routes.

 

84 - George Barnard
Coventry, Connecticut, 1819 – Cedarville, New York, 1902
Trestle Bridge at Whiteside
About 1864
Albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Museum purchase; ex-collection Philip Medicus

Taken in 1864 as part of the series of photographs that would be published in 1866 as Photographic Views of the Sherman Campaign (see no. 53), this image shows a newly constructed four-tiered, 240-metre-long railroad trestle bridge built by the Union engineers at Whiteside, Tennessee. A guard camp was set up along one of the riverbanks.

 

85 - Jasper Francis Cropsey
Rossville, New York, 1823 – Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, 1900
Study for Starrucca Viaduct—Autumn
Mid-1850s–early 1860s
Oil on canvas
The Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

This vibrant, little-known oil sketch is closely related in composition to Cropsey’s famous painting Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania (1865, now at the Toledo Museum of Art). In fact, the artist executed at least four paintings of the subject around 1864–1865. The date for this work, however, remains conjectural, and it could have been created any time between the mid-1850s and early 1860s. The viaduct, 317 metres long and 30 metres high, with 17 supporting arches, had been constructed for the New York and Erie Railroad in 1848. While Cropsey shared the Hudson River School’s vision of the sublimity and harmony of Nature, he was also capable of expressing the wonder of Man’s achievements within it. Technological advances are depicted as integrated within the natural order, without detracting from its surroundings. Indeed, the work implies Divine benediction upon America’s accomplishments.

 

86 - Alexander Henderson
Edinburgh, Scotland, 1831 – Montreal, 1913
Victoria Bridge, Grand Trunk Railway
About 1878
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

The construction of the Victoria Bridge, which crosses the St. Lawrence River at Montreal, connecting the island with the South Shore, began in 1854 and was completed in 1859. Created as part of a two-thousand-kilometre route from Sarnia, Ontario, to Portland, Maine, the three-kilometre bridge rests on twenty-four stone piers. In the summer of 1860, the Prince of Wales visited Montreal and formally inaugurated the passage, although the first train had actually crossed the previous November. The longest in the world at the time, the bridge (then covered) was considered an engineering marvel. Nonetheless, its design rapidly proved to be obsolete and its route unprofitable. In 1897 the bridge was substantially renovated and remains in use, now serving both as a roadway and for railway connection to Halifax.

 

87 - William Notman
Paisley, Scotland, 1826 – Montreal, 1891
Glacier Range, from Summit
About 1887
Albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Gift of Alden Scott Boyer

British Columbia had been brought into Confederation in 1871 with the promise of a transcontinental railroad, and the construction by the Canadian Pacific Railway began in 1881. By 1885 a connection between Ontario and the coast of British Columbia at Fort Moody had been achieved. The track was extended to the newly incorporated city of Vancouver in 1886, as the western terminus of the line. In 1889, completion of a connection with Maine established the CPR as the first transcontinental railway company in North America. Through the construction of the railroad, Canada confirmed its claim on all land north of the fiftieth parallel against the United States’ territorial ambitions. The process tore through virgin forests and the untamed wilderness of western Alberta and British Columbia.

 

88 - William Notman and Son
Loop Showing the Four Tracks on the Canadian Pacific Railway
About 1886
Collodion print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

 

89 - William Notman
Paisley, Scotland, 1826 – Montreal, 1891
The Glacier, Mt. Sir Donald and C.P.R. Hotel
About 1887
Albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Gift of Alden Scott Boyer

From the outset, railway officials recognized the potential of gaining access through the Rocky Mountains, not only for its commercial possibilities and the opening of the West to development but also for the establishment of tourist destinations. Notman, for his part, recognized the potential for dramatic images of a magnificent and unfamiliar Canadian frontier for clients on the East Coast, as witnessed by his underwriting of the costs for the presence of photographers during the surveying and construction of the railway, including Benjamin Baltzly. The achievement was extraordinary, considering the extreme climates, rough conditions and bulky wet-collodion-process equipment required.

 

90 - William Henry Jackson
Keeseville, New York, 1843 – New York, 1942
Canyon of the Rio Las Animas, W. H. J. and Co., Denver
1882
W. H. Jackson sample album, Colorado Book, vol. 8, no. 2
Albumen print mounted on album page
Denver Public Library, Western History Collection

Jackson’s photograph was among those published in the 1880s by the railway companies, anxious to encourage tourism with dynamic and picturesque imagery. During this decade Jackson came to specialize in rail images, travelling sometimes with his friend, the artist Thomas Moran. With an open travel pass and private car on the railroads, the photographer captured a wide range of subjects, which he then printed in large formats for exhibition in train stations, railway offices and travel offices, and in smaller formats for sale to individuals. This dramatic photograph, taken in the summer of 1882, records a turn along the Las Animas Perdidas River in southwestern Colorado. The powerful puff of steam from the engine confirms the conquest of natural obstacles by human ingenuity and the carriage windows suggest magnificent panoramas permitted by modern rail transport—the promise of secure, comfortable travel yet excitement and novelty to lure the East Coast tourist.

 

91 - Darius Kinsey
Maryville, Missouri, 1869 – Sedro-Wooley, Washington, 1945
Four Logs from One Fir Tree Scaled 27,000 Feet. Cherry Valley Timber Co., Stillwater, Washington
About 1918
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Gift of Albert A. Shipton, Penticton, British Columbia, 1983

 

92 - Homer Ransford Watson
Doon, Ontario, 1855 – Doon, 1936
The Loggers
About 1902
Oil on canvas
Collection Power Corporation of Canada

Watson was influenced both by the Barbizon School in France and the American artist George Inness. The Loggers marks a development in his work from earlier landscapes of Nature itself to later, more densely populated landscapes that incorporate active narratives. Images of the traditional rural labours taken from the Ontario countryside become elegies to the nobility of such work, set here beneath the arching embrace of a bower. Such comforting images of the lower classes were highly sought after among collectors in Montreal and Toronto society.

 

93 - Darius Kinsey
Maryville, Missouri, 1869 – Sedro-Wooley, Washington, 1945
Three Loggers Felling a Fir Tree, Washington
1906
Gelatin silver print
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections Division, Seattle

Kinsey was one of the outstanding photographers of the Pacific Northwest logging industry. Together with his wife, Tabitha, whom Kinsey met at a logging camp and who became his photographic printmaker, they created an enormous archive of thousands of images devoted to logging and its culture. In 1906 the Kinseys established their studio, Timber Views Company, in Seattle, creating photographs of remarkable clarity, subtlety of tone and compositional structure. The Kinseys worked out a production process they followed well into the twentieth century: he would expose the glass plate negatives at the isolated sites, using his large Empire State camera and special tripods, and take orders from the loggers. At the end of the day he would send the negative plates to his wife for development and mounting, then sell the prints (at the price of fifty cents per print) at the logging camps. Kinsey was popular with the loggers over the course of many years.

 

94 - Darius Kinsey
Maryville, Missouri, 1869 – Sedro-Wooley, Washington, 1945
Cherry Valley Timber Company, Stillwater
1919
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Accessions Committee Fund

 

95 - Timothy O’Sullivan
New York, 1840 – New York, 1882
Gould Curry Mine. Comstock Lode Mine Works, Virginia City, Nevada
1868
Albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Gift of Harvard University

While working with the geological surveys, O’Sullivan shot images at once geologically informative and aesthetically dramatic. The first major vein of silver ore in the United States was discovered in Nevada (then part of western Utah Territory) in 1858. The discovery created a sensation throughout the Union. The result was a stampede of prospectors and the opening of mining camps throughout the region. Pursued to a depth of a thousand metres, the deposits afforded great wealth, estimated at four hundred million dollars in silver and gold. In 1867 O’Sullivan was appointed official photographer to the US Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the supervision of Clarence King. It was at the beginning of the expedition in Virginia City that he created this photograph. His recent Civil War battlefield photography experience certainly aided him in creating this trenchant, even brutal image, which he took with cumbersome equipment in the confined space of the mine shaft. After about 1874, the deposits began to dwindle. Mining in the region effectively ceased in 1878.

 

96 - Carleton E. Watkins
Oneonta, New York, 1829 – Imola, California, 1916
Cofferdam at End of Main Diversion (Golden Feather Mining Claim)
1871–1876
Albumen print
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Hearst Collection of Mining Views by Carleton E. Watkins, Berkeley

In 1891, Watkins undertook his last commercial project, photographs of the Golden Feather and Golden Gate Mines, in Butte County, California. The images were exposed onto mammoth-scale collodion wet plates. His earlier experiences in documenting geodetic surveys and the Southern Pacific Railroad served him well.

 

97 - Carleton E. Watkins
Oneonta, New York, 1829 – Imola, California, 1916
Chinese Laborers Excavating River Gravel (Golden Gate Mining Claim)
1871–1876
Albumen print
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Hearst Collection of Mining Views by Carleton E. Watkins, Berkeley

 

98 - Ozias Leduc
Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, 1864 – Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, 1955
Day’s End
1913
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Purchase, Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest

Leduc’s profound spiritualism and symbolist leanings are evident in this painting, which also originally bore the title The Iron Gates. In this mysterious and disquieting composition, a rope ladder hangs down a rock or a quarry face, with shovels and mining tools in the foreground. A curious wisp of smoke, presumably from a recently abandoned fire, ascends from the hollow of the rock. The painting is derived from studies Leduc made of the Demix and Poudrette quarries, near Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, an area rich in iron and manganese deposits. The subject is symbolically one of Man’s descent into the earth and the possibility of ascent from its dark realm.

 

99 - Horatio Walker
Listowel, Ontario, 1858 – Sainte-Pétronille, Quebec, 1938
The Ice Cutters
1904
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Gift of Mrs. F. S. Smithers in memory of Charles Francis Smithers

Ice cutting was introduced to rural Quebec in the nineteenth century. The three men are shown cutting, loading and hauling ice for storage in an icehouse. The bluish-tinged ice block, cut with handsaws and squared with axes, is carted by the workhorse. As in Homer Watson’s The Loggers (no. 92), Walker focuses on traditional labours of rugged rural figures, their unity of effort with the horse spiritually “exalted” under a benevolent sunlight. As Watson’s paintings served an appreciative clientele in Montreal and Toronto that found comfort and social validation in images of the Ontario countryside, so Walker’s focused on scenes of rural Quebec. The works of both artists are reminiscent of the evocation of ennobled peasant life found in the paintings of Jean-François Millet.

 

100 - Tom Thomson
Claremont, Ontario, 1877 – Canoe Lake, Ontario, 1917
The Pointers (Pageant of the North)
1915
Oil on canvas
The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House Permanent Collection, Toronto
Purchased by the Art Committee with the Print Fund

Thomson’s knowledge of Post-Impressionism and use of Divisionist brushstrokes are most clearly exemplified in this painting. The artist likely became familiar with Divisionism through the art of Giovanni Segantini, whose paintings had been reproduced over a decade earlier in the widely distributed German cultural magazine Jugend and had earlier interested such painters as Marsden Hartley (nos. 171, 172). Pointers, or pointed-prowed portage boats, were used by the northern Ontario logging companies to carry supplies and horses to the loggers before the winter ice set in. The subject also reflects Thomson’s fascination with the wilderness areas of the province.

 

101 - Aaron Allan Edson
Stanbridge, Quebec, 1846 – Glen Sutton, Quebec, 1888
Lumbermen on the St. Maurice
1868
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Gift of Marian Ives

Like his contemporary, the American artist Robert S. Duncanson, with whom he studied in Montreal around 1863, Edson combined the romantic vision and detailed realism of the Hudson River School with a greater naturalism in lighting and a more bucolic sensibility. While he usually depicted scenes from his beloved native Eastern Townships in the countryside south of Montreal, he occasionally turned to Quebec sites north of the city, as in this work. The cropping and planar structure of his compositions, unified by the effects of sunlight, reflect the increasing influence of photography.

 

102 - Robert S. Duncanson
Fayette, New York, 1821 – Detroit, 1872
View of the St. Anne’s River
1870
Oil on canvas
Saint Louis Art Museum
Museum purchase

Duncanson’s career as a black artist closely tied to the Hudson River School is a remarkable one. Born to a free family in Michigan in 1821, he was the first African-American artist to gain an international reputation. In the midst of the Civil War, upon returning from exhibiting his work in Europe in 1863, he chose to settle in Montreal rather than go back to the United States. Here he experienced significant success and critical acclaim, advancing Canadian landscape painting. Duncanson exhibited internationally as a Canadian in 1865, returning that year to Great Britain to a triumphal reception by critics and society. The following year he resettled in Cincinnati. This painting is among his last before succumbing to mental illness and death in 1872.

 

103 - Homer Ransford Watson
Doon, Ontario, 1855 – Doon, 1936
After the Rain
1883
Oil on canvas
The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick
Gift of Lord Beaverbrook

Watson’s profound and early appreciation of the Hudson River School was conjoined with the influence of George Inness’s rural scenes and palette, and in this painting the latter influence is more apparent. The scene is taken near Doon, in southern Ontario, a rural area near Kitchener where Watson’s father had owned a mill, to which he returned in 1877. His sale of Pioneer Mill (1879), also from that site, to Queen Victoria had advanced his career and encouraged him to continue painting such motifs, often featuring brooding skies or rain effects and rutted roads.

 

104 - Homer Ransford Watson
Doon, Ontario, 1855 – Doon, 1936
Country Road, Stormy Day
About 1895
Oil on board
Private collection

In the 1890s Watson persisted in focusing on the subjects of his earlier works (no. 103), replete with a farmer’s cart, another of his preferred motifs. His compositions were reinvigorated however by travel to Europe in 1887. That trip included his first visit to England, exposing him to the art of John Constable, whose handling of clouds and trees he admired, and to France, where he studied the works of the Barbizon painters, whose aesthetic he found particularly sympathetic.

 

105 - Thomas Eakins
Philadelphia, 1844 – Philadelphia, 1916
Three Fishermen Mending Nets
1881
Modern ink-jet print from original glass plate negative
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, Philadelphia
Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust

Eakins’s passion for photography and his rapidly acquired expertise as a photographer are universally recognized. The medium, which reduced his dependence on posed models, profoundly informed his painting aesthetic in many ways. In the painting Mending the Net (no. 109), for which these photographs taken in Gloucester, New Jersey, photographs served as studies. The softer-focus images of the geese (of which he took eighteen negatives) in the foreground of the painting correspond to the moving figures in his photographs. Other prints also apparently inspired the distinct crispness and focus for the figures of the fishermen. Indeed, Eakins experimented with a wide range of lenses in the course of his photographic studies. The artist exposed no less than thirty-one negatives in preparation for the painting. The seated figure reading the newspaper beneath the tree is Eakins’s father.

 

106 - Thomas Eakins
Philadelphia, 1844 – Philadelphia, 1916
Tree near the Delaware River
1881
Modern ink-jet print from original glass plate negative
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, Philadelphia
Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust

 

107 - Thomas Eakins
Philadelphia, 1844 – Philadelphia, 1916
Geese with Tree and Two Men in Background
1881
Modern ink-jet print from original glass plate negative
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, Philadelphia
Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust

 

108 - Thomas Eakins
Philadelphia, 1844 – Philadelphia, 1916
Benjamin Eakins and Man Sitting Under a Tree
1881
Modern ink-jet print from original glass plate negative
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, Philadelphia
Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust

 

109 - Thomas Eakins
Philadelphia, 1844 – Philadelphia, 1916
Mending the Net
1881
Oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Gift of Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss Mary Adeline Williams, 1929

Shad fishing along the Delaware River was the major industry in Gloucester, New Jersey, an area where Philadelphians vacationed in the later nineteenth century, enjoying both the beaches and the opportunities for more urbane diversions. This famous painting, Eakins’s most monumental picture of the site, plays with the social dynamic between tourists, their activities and preoccupations, and the engaged shad fishermen in this carefully composed yet seemingly spontaneous view.

 

110 - Martin Johnson Heade
Lumberville, Pennsylvania, 1819 – St. Augustine, Florida, 1904
Newbury Hayfield at Sunset
1862
Oil on canvas
Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York
Gift of Jacqueline Stemmler Adams in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick M. Stemmler

Heade began painting images of haystacks and salt marshes in the late 1850s but continued working the theme until about 1890, producing roughly 120 marsh scenes. The marshland about Newburyport, up the coast from Boston, fascinated him. The entire landscape is illuminated by the richly atmospheric light, the golden and orange-toned sunset conveying serenity to the scene. The introspective, meditative character of the work and its appeal to personal sentiment through its simplified composition and its tonal effects characterize Heade as a Luminist painter. The painting, with its aura of Divine benediction expressed in nature, was created in 1862, the darkest period for the Union during the Civil War.

 

111 - Charles William Jefferys
Rochester, England, 1869 – Toronto, 1951
Wheat Stacks on the Prairies
1907
Oil on canvas
The Government of Ontario Art Collection, Archives of Ontario, Toronto

Evidently influenced by Claude Monet, Jefferys distinguishes himself from that master in the freedom and self-declarative independence of his brushstrokes and in the rejection of Impressionist rules for the use of reflected and complementary colours. Fascinated with prairie landscapes, he executed photographs as well as drawings and paintings of the broad expanses, unapologetically including grain elevators, silos, barns and multiple other indications of human civilization and the harvesting of Nature. This picture is a result of his first Western trip, which carried him to central Manitoba in 1906.

 

112 - Ozias Leduc
Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, 1864 – Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, 1955
The Hayfield
1901
Oil on canvas
Private collection

These works constitute the first two of a trilogy completed by Leduc in 1901, the third being a winter scene, The Choquette Farm, Beloeil. All three were painted at the commission of the Honourable Philippe-Auguste Choquette. Leduc, who often turned to rural subjects in the Richelieu Valley in Quebec, was, at the time, friends with the extended Choquette family, including the Abbé Choquette and his brother, Ernest, who had recently written a novel which was serialized in 1899, Claude Paysan, illustrated by Leduc. That work of fiction spoke to the rigours and loneliness of rural life but also to the venerable farming traditions and local customs along the banks of the Richelieu River. These themes resonated profoundly with the religiously infused sensibilities of Leduc. The Choquette Farm replicates a photograph taken by Leduc, and The Hayfield also relies on photography. Leduc evokes a world of serene and comfortingly returning cycles.

 

113 - Ozias Leduc
Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, 1864 – Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, 1955
Fall Plowing
1901
Oil on canvas
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City

 

114 - Winslow Homer
Boston, 1836 – Prouts Neck, Maine, 1910
Two Guides
1877
Oil on canvas
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

The two figures in this painting have been identified as the young guide Monroe Holt and his elder, Orson Phelps, standing before a composite view of the Adirondacks, including the Keene Valley and Beaver Mountain. The elder figure, Phelps, was a renowned mountaineer, guide and cartographer of the region whose family had settled in the Keene Valley in the 1840s. He carries a pack derived from those of Aboriginal origin. The rustic figure forms a conceptual bridge between the direct and intuitive relation with Nature of primitive men and the activities of the sophisticated travellers and leisure seekers of the 1870s whom they guided and initiated into the outdoors and who would have purchased such a painting. The picture was directed to the increasingly urban, upscale male population of the nation, who sought outdoor activities as catharses and assertions of their masculinity in distinction to the daily stresses and unnatural office environments they habituated.

 

115 - John Singer Sargent
Florence, 1856 – London, 1925
Tents at Lake O’Hara
1916
Oil on canvas
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund

During the summer of 1916 Sargent, avoiding return to England from Boston during the midst of the First World War, ventured West and North to the Canadian Rockies, trekking with his manservant and a Swedish guide to paint the Twin Falls in the Yoho Valley. He had been alerted to the site by Denman Ross at Harvard University. He also painted the nearby Lake O’Hara, armed with commissions from his friend and patroness Isabella Stewart Gardner and from Edward Forbes, director of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. The artist avoided the developed resort of Lake Louise as the site had become too much of a tourist attraction. Hoping to evoke his earlier summers spent in the Alps (an analogy actively advertised by the Canadian Pacific Railway’s promotions), Sargent found the expedition more demanding and inhospitable than he had anticipated. Nonetheless he returned with four paintings, three of which are included here, and five watercolours. His trip is the subject of an essay in the exhibition catalogue.

 

116 - John Singer Sargent
Florence, 1856 – London, 1925
Inside a Tent in the Canadian Rockies
1916
Oil on canvas
Collection of Meredith and Cornelia Long, Houston

 

117 - John Singer Sargent
Florence, 1856 – London, 1925
Yoho Falls
1916
Oil on canvas
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

 

118 - Frederick Arthur Verner
Sheridan, Ontario, 1836 – London, 1928
Salmon Pool on the Godbout River
1877
Oil on canvas
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City

This painting illustrates fishing in a salmon pool on the Godbout River, north of the St. Lawrence. More fundamentally, it is a depiction of what had become a leisure activity of sportsmen, with contemporary, informal, rustically clothed figures set amidst a wild and seemingly unspoilt Nature.

 

119 - Frank Jay Haynes
Saline, Michigan, 1853 – Saline, 1921
Cascades of Columbia
1885
Albumen print
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

In this photograph, taken only a few years after the painting by Verner, the emphasis is quite altered. Haynes held the post of photographer for the Northern Pacific Railroad from 1876, creating images to encourage tourism and settlement along the rail lines. He was appointed official photographer of Yellowstone in 1884 (no. 17). This image speaks precisely to that promotional concern. Civilized gentlemen are shown in their fishing attire, assuming the roles of sportsmen, venturing out to the dynamic river and capturing a large salmon in a net, asserting themselves through recreation in the wilderness, engaged in invigorating “masculine” activity.

 

120 - William Raphael
Nakel, Prussia, 1833 – Montreal, 1914
With the Current
1892
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Purchase, Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest

 

121 - Eastman Johnson
Lovell, Maine, 1824 – New York, 1906
Hollyhocks
1876
Oil on canvas
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut
Harriet Russell Stanley Fund

The mid-1870s were a period of transition for Johnson. Upon the heels of a successful early career as a lithographer and draftsman in Boston, the artist had trained at the Düsseldorf Academy. He solidified his reputation as a painter in the 1860s with images of New England rural life. Hollyhocks marks an essay at a new career venture: specifically feminine subjects. As the May 27, 1874, issue of the New York Evening Post noted, the painting depicts “a country school yard,” albeit, given the fashionable attire the ladies are modelling, a quite upscale academy indeed!

 

122 - William Brymner
Greenock, Scotland, 1855 – Wallasey, England, 1925
Champ-de-Mars, Winter
1892
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Mrs. R. MacD. Paterson Bequest (R. B. Angus Collection)

The composition of Brymner’s casual winter scene of the central square of Old Montreal behind the City Hall, featuring such vignettes as well-dressed ladies accompanying a child walking her dog along the snow path, a youth tugging a sleigh across the field and other small gatherings, is quite evidently influenced by contemporary photography. With the advent of Eastman Kodak’s quick-exposure and easy-carry Brownie camera, amateur photography had itself become a popular activity. Director and professor of the Art Association of Montreal from 1886 to 1921, Brymner avoided industrial views in favour of the more picturesque and traditional, even in his urban scenes. Champ-de-Mars, Winter both reflects contemporary techniques and activities while responding to conservative tastes.

 

123 - James Wilson Morrice
Montreal, 1865 – Tunis, 1924
Ice Bridge over the Saint-Charles River
1908
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Gift of James Wilson Morrice Estate

Morrice’s paintings of Canadian subjects present contemporary life while evoking regional identity. In this painting, he unsentimentally juxtaposes the traditional image of a local resident crossing the partially frozen St. Charles River along a route marked by fir branches with the unromanticized buildings along the bank. Morrice was well acquainted with current trends in Paris, including the directness in the treatment of subject matter of Impressionism and the evocative use of colour and simplification of profile of Post-Impressionism.

 

125 - William Merritt Chase
Williamsburg, Indiana, 1849 – New York, 1916
Morning at Breakwater, Shinnecock
About 1897
Oil on canvas
Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, Chicago

While Chase’s Impressionism emerged in the late 1880s in images of New York City parks, it was in the 1890s, in his scenes of Shinnecock near South Hampton, Long Island, that he explored, with a more brilliant colour range, congenial images of summer leisure activities, sunny flower-bedecked open fields, and the comfortable existence of the middle class at rest and play. Chase found both inspiration and pleasure in Shinnecock, establishing an art academy there in 1891, where he taught until 1902. The site of this picture is in the immediate area of Chase’s home and the figures are probably his wife and children. His American Impressionism is distinct from the French model in its clear structure and crisp linearity.

 

126 - Henry L. Rand
1862 – 1945
Somes Sound, Looking South
1893
Platinum print
Southwest Harbor Public Library, Maine

Rand was a Boston-area resident and fine amateur photographer who summered in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and ultimately retired there. Many years after his death his widow presented about fourteen hundred meticulously inventoried photographs by him to the Southwest Harbor Library. They include images of Maine and elsewhere in New England, as well as other sites, views of ships and portraits of Victorian ladies posed elegantly in formal attire. Somes Sound runs along Mount Desert Island, a favoured location for the photographer. The image combines his interest in recording the landscape of that island with his taste for decorously presenting finely attired Victorian women.

 

127 - Clarence H. White
West Carlisle, Ohio, 1871 – Mexico City, 1925
Jane White with Crystal Globe, Newark, Ohio
1906
Platinum print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

Co-founder of Photo-Secessionism in 1902, Clarence White worked closely with Alfred Stieglitz, who published his photographs in Camera Work. White’s Pictorialist photographs reflect the influence of James McNeil Whistler in their softening of details and of Japanese prints in their compositions. Reacting against “straight” photography, his images were admired by critics particularly for their demonstration of previously unimagined aesthetic potentialities of the medium and their evocative, luminous effects which White achieved through controlled and manipulated lighting. Here he records his wife in 1906 near their home in Newark, Ohio. The artist permanently moved to New York City later that year and became an influential teacher, whose students would include such renowned photographers as Margaret Bourke-White, Laura Gilpin, Dorothea Lange, Karl Struss and Paul Outerbridge.

 

128 - Julian Alden Weir
West Point, New York, 1852 – New York, 1919
The Red Bridge
1895
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Gift of Mrs. John A. Rutherfurd, 1914

Weir’s adoption of Impressionism was encouraged by travel to Europe in the 1880s. His subsequent life was divided between New York City and his wife’s family’s summer houses in Connecticut. The Red Bridge, a site near Windham, Connecticut, reflects the artist’s adherence to Impressionist aesthetics, both in its modern subject (the iron bridge over the Shetucket River had replaced a covered bridge) and its allusion to Japanese woodcuts in its high horizon, compositional design, cropping and decorative devices, including the extended, curving branch in the foreground.

 

129 - Willard Leroy Metcalf
Lowell, Massachusetts, 1858 – New York, 1925
Midsummer Shadows
1911
Oil on canvas
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
Robert W. Carle, B.A. 1897, Fund

Metcalf’s subjects featured rural scenes, landscapes and farm life, and the artist responded increasingly to the Impressionist palette which he came to know in France in the 1880s, a conversion encouraged by his association with Childe Hassam and The Ten, a group of American artists formed in 1898 in protest against the rigorous exhibition standards of the National Academy of Design. These sorts of naturalistic, informal and gentle scenes, bathed in warm sunlight and culled from the New England countryside, found a ready market.

 

130 - William Brymner
Greenock, Scotland, 1855 – Wallasey, England, 1925
Summer Landscape
1910
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Gift of the Reverend and Mrs. Sydenham B. Lindsay

The exceptionally large format of this painting is reminiscent of the sort of academic “machines” so popular over a generation earlier among Americans. Such monumental Brymners were generally the result of specific commissions from the Canadian Pacific Railway and other commercial enterprises. It is not coincidental that Brymner had travelled to Paris in 1878, spending five years at the Académie Julian and working under William Bouguereau.

 

131 - Ernest Percyval Tudor-Hart
Montreal, 1873 – Montreal, 1954
Springtime in Canada
1903
Oil on canvas
Art Gallery of Hamilton
Gift from the estate of the artist, 1973

Born in Montreal, Tudor-Hart was a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme and lived much of his life in London, also retaining a residence in Dinard, France. His interest in Impressionism, especially in the work of Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas (he also came to be an admirer of Paul Cézanne), is evident in this canvas, with its treatment of the sunlit countryside of his native Quebec and its brilliant, exuberant colourism, open brushwork and remarkably high horizon line.

 

132 - James Wilson Morrice
Montreal, 1865 – Tunis, 1924
The Terrace, Quebec
1910–1911
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Dufferin Terrace in Quebec City was constructed in 1879 along the plateau abutting the Chateau Frontenac, overlooking the St. Lawrence. Morrice spent the summer of 1910 in Canada. The painting is a very carefully controlled composition, established by the horizontal planar bands and by the dominant tree in the right foreground with its foliage running the entire width of the canvas. Morrice responded to a range of English and French artistic influences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century during his years in Paris, including Whistler, Walter Sickert, the Nabis and Henri Matisse. He also came to know American painters, notably Robert Henri and Maurice Prendergast. The stylistic parallels yet distinct sensibilities between Morrice and Prendergast are very striking.

 

133 - Maurice Prendergast
St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1858 – New York, 1924
Summer Day, Salem
About 1915–1918
Oil on canvas
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast

In comparison with Morrice’s style, Prendergast’s is generally less linearly conceived and more open, with his application of blocks of unmodulated colour, reflecting his passion and extraordinary talent as a watercolourist. His figural images often focus on women and children in activity, on the streets or in public spaces, but never in domestic settings. He had, like Morrice, studied in Paris, travelling there in the early 1890s and studying at the Académie Julian, but he also appreciated the work of Manet and was influenced by Whistler and the Nabis, executing many watercolours and painting outdoors. He returned to Boston in 1895 and by the end of the decade travelled to Italy, notably Venice, where he experienced Italian fifteenth-century art, which gave greater structure and solidity to his later works. This is visible in the horizontal bands of this composition, Summer Hotel, Maine (no. 134) and particularly Central Park (no. 135), all from the mid-1910s.

 

134 - Maurice Prendergast
St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1858 – New York, 1924
Summer Hotel, Maine
About 1914–1915
Oil on panel
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast

In July 1914 Prendergast went to Ogunquit, Maine, for his summer vacation.

 

135 - Maurice Prendergast
St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1858 – New York, 1924
Central Park
About 1914–1915
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
George A. Hearn Fund, 1950

Prendergast executed a number of promenade scenes in Central Park, both in watercolour and oil, during this period. Although not among his most popular works, the Park offered the motifs and compositional structures that so interested him.

 

136 - Clarence Gagnon
Montreal, 1881 – Montreal, 1942
The Wayside Cross, Autumn
1916
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Gagnon trained under William Brymner in Montreal, travelling to France in 1904 and studying at the Académie Julian. He also visited Italy. During this period, apart from the major impact upon him of Impressionism, he became influenced by the canvases of James Wilson Morrice. Gagnon would often visit Paris in the succeeding years, settling there in the 1920s. Upon returning to Montreal in 1908, he focused for several years on scenes of rural Quebec, applying a more modernist aesthetic. However, rather than simplifying his compositions to give them structure, as did Morrice, Gagnon favoured a brilliant panoply of orchestrated colours and tonal gradations. The view is from the Charlevoix region of Quebec.

 

137 - Alexander Young Jackson
Montreal, 1882 – Kleinburg, Ontario, 1974
Early Spring, Émileville, Quebec
1913
Oil on canvas
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Max Stern, Dominion Gallery, Montreal

Jackson was one of many young artists of his generation who studied under William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal, in his case succeeded by training at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Académie Julian and travel throughout Europe. When he left France in 1911, he was painting in a style indebted to the Impressionists. His return to Montreal that year was not marked by commercial success and, considering emigration to the United States, he travelled to Émileville, Quebec, to sketch and paint. In 1913 Jackson moved to Toronto, where he associated with the artists who would constitute the original members of the Group of Seven.

 

138 - James Wilson Morrice
Montreal, 1865 – Tunis, 1924
The Old Holton House, Montreal
About 1908–1909
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Purchase, John W. Tempest Fund

The anecdotal details in this painting—the horse-drawn sleigh, a favoured device of the artist, and the woman and child—do not appear in the artist’s significantly earlier preparatory drawing for the painting. Morrice spent his winters in Montreal until 1914, when his parents died. Located on the north side of Sherbrooke Street, the Holton House was destroyed in 1912 to make space for the building now known as the Hornstein Pavilion of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The work is carefully constructed in a grid defined by the centrally placed house, the verticality of the trees and firm horizontality of the fence, both running the length of the picture, and the genre elements.

 

139 - Lawren Stewart Harris
Brantford, Ontario, 1885 – Vancouver, 1970
Red House and Yellow Sleigh
About 1920
Oil on burlap
Vancouver Art Gallery
Founders’ Fund

This particularly controlled and geometrically gridded painting of a Toronto house by Harris makes a fascinating comparison with the preceding Morrice. Indeed, both artists relied on the horizontal elements of the fences and houses to anchor their compositions and used the vignette detail of a sleigh. Harris’s composition, however, adopts a dramatic, modernist attack upon Nature, and his dynamic trees, deeply influenced by his experience of the 1913 modern Scandinavian landscape painting exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, are the true actors in the work. Nonetheless, as demonstrated by the contrasting vividness and raw colourism of the snowy trees, the blue reflections and the cloud-dappled sky, Harris felt constrained by such urban subjects and expressed himself most freely in the wilderness.

 

140 - Georgia O’Keeffe
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887 – Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1986
Church Bell, Ward, Colorado
1917
Oil on board
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation

In New York in 1914, O’Keeffe rapidly gained exposure and a sophisticated understanding of the tenets of European modernism, seeing works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Francis Picabia at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 and studying Wassili Kandinsky’s theory of colour and spirituality, which encouraged a simplification of expression into geometrically reduced, colouristically resonant forms. After an exhibition with Stieglitz in 1916, O’Keeffe returned to Texas, where she had worked earlier in the decade. The Southwest landscape proved to be fertile ground for her to synthesize these stylistic influences and articulate a mature style. That aesthetic is dramatically asserted in Church Bell, Ward, Colorado, with its powerfully vertical composition, the roof and steeple towers resembling assertive arrows, hovering in brilliant colours against the landscape, which picks up accents of their bright oranges and yellows.

 

141 - Emily Carr
Victoria 1871 – Victoria 1945
Vancouver Street
1912–1913
Oil on cardboard
Private collection

In 1910, Carr visited France, returning to British Columbia in the fall of 1911 and settling in Vancouver in 1912. That visit proved essential to the future direction of her art. Her palette and her freedom in defining forms reflect the profound influence of the Fauves. Over the succeeding years she would bring increased discipline to her compositions as well as clarity and monumentality to her subjects. This painting is a dazzling exemplar of the intensity of her first response and reinvigorated style following her recent European travel.

 

143 - Alexander Henderson
Edinburgh, Scotland, 1831 – Montreal, 1913
Point Levis
About 1870–1875
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa
Point Levis, located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River opposite Quebec City, became an important railway centre in 1854, with its potential for connections south and east, including to Maine and the Maritimes. The city was incorporated in 1861 and soon developed into an active, moderate-scaled commercial centre with ferries to Quebec City.

 

144 - Andrew Joseph Russell
Walpole, New Hampshire, 1830 – Brooklyn, 1902
Corinne Panoramic View No. 2, Utah
1869
Albumen print
Collection of the Union Pacific Railroad, Council Bluffs, Iowa

A small railroad town, as recorded in Russell’s photograph, constituted a group of tents and temporary houses and shacks set up about the tracks being constructed. As the railroad moved onward, the dwellings were readily taken down or disassembled and carried to the next temporary centre. Sometimes these centres took root and grew into incorporated towns; more often they ended with the line’s movement westward.

 

145 - Carleton E. Watkins
Oneonta, New York, 1829 – Imola, California, 1916
Depot and RR Works from Los Angeles, S.P.R.R.
1880
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

In 1880 Watkins travelled along the Southern Pacific Railroad, including an extended stretch northward along the coast from San Diego, promoting the area of Southern California by photographing its agricultural development as well as such new industries as the oil wells, and capturing, among other towns, the quiet streets of the burgeoning community of Los Angeles.

 

146 - William Notman and Son
Hastings Street, Vancouver, British Columbia
About 1890
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

Although earlier explored by Easterners (notably by Simon Fraser in 1808), the Vancouver area was only settled by Europeans in 1862 due to its longstanding and assertive occupation by the Squamish Nation. Like Seattle, lumbering was its earliest industry and exportation of timber began in 1865. Surveyed in 1870, the land for the development of the modern town began to take shape under the name of Granville in the Gastown area where this view of Hastings Street was taken. A fire in June 1886 offered the opportunity to develop the town along modern urban planning principles. Canadian Pacific Railway officials had seen the possibilities of the harbour from the outset and extended the transcontinental line from Port Moody to Vancouver in 1887, the town having been reincorporated under that name the preceding year. The impact of development is reflected in the city’s rapid population growth from 5,000 in 1887 to 15,000 in 1892 and then to 100,000 in 1900.

 

147 - William Notman and Son
View of Saint John, New Brunswick, from Trinity Church, Looking West
Before 1877
Collodion print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

The commercial and military possibilities of Saint John were recognized early by European settlers and a fort was established there in the 1630s. Situated where the Saint John River empties into the Bay of Fundy, it became a major centre of commerce and immigration in the nineteenth century. This photograph was taken before the devastating 1877 fire that destroyed most of the city, dominated by wooden structures. Rebuilding was done with stone and brick.

 

148 - Alexander Henderson
Edinburgh, Scotland, 1831 – Montreal, 1913
Montreal Harbour from Custom House
About 1874
Albumen print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

Founded in 1642, Montreal made a superb port of entry for the interior of Quebec and Lower Canada. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the city became the commercial and cultural centre of the colony and nation, Toronto only gaining commercial ascendancy during the second half of the twentieth century.

 

149 - Asahel Curtis
Minnesota, 1874 – Seattle, 1941
Denny Hill Regrade
About 1910
Collotype
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections Division, Seattle

Seattle was founded in 1851 and in its early years served as a centre in the lumber industry. The town was circumvented by the railroad in the 1870s, after railroad officials chose Tacoma as the terminus for a transcontinental line. The beginning of Seattle’s tremendous expansion can be dated to 1897, when it served as a port of return from the Klondike Gold Rush. Rapid development and immigration resulted. In 1910, following proposals by the engineer R. H. Thompson, the city undertook a major redevelopment campaign, levelling the steep hills in the Denny Hill area with new hydraulic technology adapted from mining. Asahel was the brother of the famous photographer Edward Curtis. After having gone to the Klondike as both miner and photographer, he returned to the family photographic business in Seattle, ultimately setting up his own studio.

 

150 - William Notman and Son
Montreal from Mount Royal
Before 1878
Collodion print
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

The 1850s witnessed the beginning of a rapid expansion of Montreal’s population. In 1852 the city numbered 58,700, and by 1871 it numbered over 107,000. By 1901 greater Montreal’s population would surpass 325,000. This picture was taken from the summit of Mount Royal (an area which opened to the public in 1876 as a park designed by Olmsted). In the distance toward the left near the St. Lawrence can be seen the twin towers of the Notre-Dame Basilica, while among the trees in the foreground are visible some of the houses of the wealthy in the newly developing residential quarter of St. Antoine.

 

151 - Maurice Galbraith Cullen
St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1866 – Chambly, Quebec, 1934
Wolfe’s Cove
1904
Oil on canvas
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City

After initial studies in drawing and sculpture in Montreal, Cullen travelled to Paris in 1888, where he remained until 1895, studying painting and discovering the art of Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet. During this time, he also visited Pont-Aven, familiarizing himself with the art of Paul Gauguin and the Nabis. In Paris, Cullen came to know James Wilson Morrice, with whom he painted in Brittany and Venice. Executed in 1903 and dated the following year, it was painted on a trip from Beaupré to beyond Quebec City with Morrice and others and is taken from the high ground overlooking the city with the massive, looming Cap Diamant on the left and Lévis on the far shore of the St. Lawrence. The afternoon view is animated by white paint strokes that define the building facades and create the effect of reflected light.

 

152 - Maurice Galbraith Cullen
St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1866 – Chambly, Quebec, 1934
Twilight, Dufferin Terrace, Quebec City
1905
Oil on canvas
Art Gallery of Windsor
Purchased by subscription by members of the Windsor medical profession, 1961

Cullen’s painting is a study in tones, with particularly effective ranges of colour to convey twilight amidst the massed architectural forms. He adopts an elevated perspective. The painting is notable for its atmospheric effects, recalling the work of both Whistler to whose work he had been introduced by James Wilson Morrice, and the Impressionists.

 

153 - Robert Henri
Cincinnati, Ohio, 1865 – New York, 1929
Street Scene with Snow (57th Street, NYC)
1902
Oil on canvas
Yale University Art Gallery, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, New Haven, Connecticut

Having been trained at the Philadelphia Academy and then the Académie Julian, Henri returned to Philadelphia before settling permanently in New York in 1900, first teaching at the New York School of Art and then at the Art Students League, where his students included George Bellows, Stewart Davis and Edward Hopper. An anti-traditionalist, Henri founded the group known as The Eight (the core of the so-called Ashcan School) in 1908. From the beginning of that decade he focused increasingly on the sort of dark yet dynamic cityscapes featured here. Henri rented a studio at 57th Street at Sixth Avenue.

 

154 - Maurice Galbraith Cullen
St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1866 – Chambly, Quebec, 1934
St. James Cathedral, Dominion Square, Montreal
About 1909–1912
Oil on canvas
The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick
Gift of Miss Olive Hosmer

Cullen’s palette features violets, pinks and blues adopted from the Impressionists, simulating the effects of reflected and refracted light through atmosphere, here characterized by falling snow and twilight, the forms on the verge of dissolving into colour fields. Yet the decorative line of the horse-drawn carriages in the foreground asserts the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and anchors this modernist work.

 

155 - Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté
Arthabaska, Quebec, 1869 – Daytona Beach, Florida, 1937
Smog, Port of Montreal
1914
Oil on canvas
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City

This contemporary city landscape by Suzor-Coté, an unusual subject for the artist, is his most urban scene. The view of Old Montreal is taken from the icy St. Lawrence, with the City Hall visible beyond the rising smoke. The painting is a study of lighting and atmospheric effects, but not in the conventional manner of Impressionism, whose technique sought to capture everyday elements under fleeting light effects. Rather, Suzor-Coté adapted the technique to convey, on a monumental scale, the effects of light themselves.

 

156 - Maurice Galbraith Cullen
St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1866 – Chambly, Quebec, 1934
Montreal Harbour
1915
Oil on canvas
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City

Between 1896 and 1914 Montreal experienced extraordinary economic growth, the commercial possibilities of the port with access from the Ottawa River to the Atlantic being exploited. The atmospheric effects offered by the cityscape attracted Cullen’s Impressionist-influenced colourism. This panoramic and monumental view encompasses in its grand scale Mount Royal, smokestacks and storage silos, steeples and new urban towers.

 

157 - James Edward Hervey MacDonald
Durham, England, 1873 – Toronto, 1932
Tracks and Traffic
1912
Oil on canvas
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Gift of Walter C. Laidlaw, Toronto, 1937

A founding member of the Group of Seven, MacDonald gained early inspiration from the work of the Impressionists, both in subjects and colour ranges, and like Cullen he explored the effects of light offered by snow and, in this case, urban train smoke. Less concerned than the Impressionists with the dissolving of forms in light, he created solid industrial shapes even within a palpable atmosphere, carefully juxtaposing horizontals and verticals. This painting captures a crisp winter morning at the Grand Trunk Railway yard near the train station in Toronto, just west of Bathurst Street. Toronto was rapidly developing into an important commercial hub for Ontario and the Plains. The picture was created at a moment of stylistic transition for the artist. In 1913 he would visit the Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art in Buffalo with Harris and would travel to Georgian Bay.

 

158 - Alfred Stieglitz
Hoboken, New Jersey, 1864 – New York, 1946
The Hand of Man
1902
Photogravure
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington
The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Georgia O’Keeffe

Stieglitz’s emblematic paean to human progress and modern technology, underlined by the title, is also paradigmatically a Photo-Secessionist print: with its smoky atmospheric light, it is at once realistic and highly symbolist. Formally, it is dominated by the train movement, energized by the joining and crossing rails and contrasts of lights and darks, and especially the dark smoke rising from the train against the lighter sky. The exposure was taken from the back of a train as it approached the Long Island Rail Road train yard in Queens. Produced in 1903, it was published as a photogravure in the first issue of Camera Work.

 

159 - Colin Campbell Cooper
Philadelphia, 1856 – Santa Barbara, California, 1937
Main Street Bridge, Rochester
1908
Oil on canvas
Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York
Gift of Mr. Hiram W. Sibley

Born in Philadelphia and initially trained at the Philadelphia Academy, Cooper travelled to Paris, profoundly affected by the art of Impressionism, especially of Claude Monet, although his American variant reflects the influence of Childe Hassam. He gained a reputation for his images of the rising New York skyline. Cooper’s depiction of the Main Street Bridge in Rochester, New York, which crosses the Genesee River, captures a principal monument in a city that had become affluent under the industry of the Eastman Kodak Company. The wide crossing rapidly developed as an extended commercial street, a sort of American Ponte Vecchio, with businesses building remarkably high edifices along its piers. Thus for all of its seemingly domestic appearance to the modern viewer, the painting actually glorified industry and commerce, however picturesquely. After various renovations, the bridge was dramatically altered during the 1950s and 1960s with the removal of buildings and the insertion of railings.

 

160 - Jacob August Riis
Ribe, Denmark, 1849 – Barre, Massachusetts, 1914
The Mulberry Bend
About 1890
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York

Riis was an immigrant to New York from Denmark and his photographs and line drawings, published in 1890 in How the Other Half Lives (edited and revised in multiple editions), explored the underside of New York’s immigrant neighbourhoods and the horrors cast by extreme poverty, unspeakable living conditions and high crime. The images accompanied texts that documented the conditions both statistically and by case studies. By 1880 over one million immigrants in the city lived in about thirty-five thousand tenements. An ardent social reformer, Riis took photographs that were intended mainly to effect political change through public outrage. Using these images for slide lectures and public exhibitions, as well as through publications, he profoundly influenced reform. Some of the images, such as Bandit’s Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry St. or Mullin’s Alley, Cherry Hill, were posed portrayals of youth gangs, families or criminals and muggers. Others were candid accounts of appalling slums and working conditions. The Mulberry Bend records daily life on a commercial street in the Lower East Side.

 

161 - Richard Hoe Lawrence and Jacob August Riis
J. A. Riis : Ribe, Denmark, 1849 – Barre, Massachusetts, 1914
Mullin’s Alley, Cherry Hill
About 1890
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York

 

162 - Richard Hoe Lawrence and Jacob August Riis
J. A. Riis : Ribe, Denmark, 1849 – Barre, Massachusetts, 1914
Bandit’s Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry St.
About 1890
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York

 

163 - Alfred Stieglitz
Hoboken, New Jersey, 1864 – New York, 1946
Spring Showers
1900–1901
Photogravure
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington
The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Georgia O’Keeffe

Stieglitz took this photograph from Madison Avenue and 23rd Street, juxtaposing verticals and horizontals in a contemporary urban context. The delicacy of the tree and the hunched figure of the street cleaner, however, recall the Japanese woodblock prints of Hiroshige. This photographic image is a particularly elegant study of atmospheric effects and tonal subtleties. Taken by the artist in 1900 or 1901, the image appeared in Camera Work in 1911.

 

164 - Alfred Stieglitz
Hoboken, New Jersey, 1864 – New York, 1946
The Flatiron (Winter)
1903
Photogravure
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington
The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Georgia O’Keeffe

Considered an architectural marvel in its time, the Flatiron Building (so nicknamed for its shape) was constructed in 1902 by Daniel Burnham at the junction of 23rd Street, Fifth Avenue and Broadway. While the iron-constructed building seems relatively modest to the modern viewer, it was admired for its refinement and technology, and Stieglitz himself described photographing it as “unnerving.” In the accompanying text to a photogravure by Sydney Allan in a 1903 issue of Camera Work, the edifice is described as most resembling “the prow of a giant man-of-war. And we would not be astonished in the least, if the whole triangular block would suddenly begin to move northward through the crowd of pedestrians and traffic of our two leading thoroughfares, which would break like the waves of the ocean on the huge prow-like angle….”

 

165 - Edward Steichen
Bivange, Luxembourg, 1879 – West Redding, Connecticut, 1973
The Flatiron (Evening)
1905
Three-colour half-tone photogravure
McGill University Libraries, Rare Books and Special Collections, Montreal

Steichen’s image is far more overtly aesthetic than Stieglitz’s, with the pictorial delicacy and tonal ranges reminiscent of a Whistler etching or Japanese woodblock print. Photographed the previous year, the work was printed in Camera Work in 1906. The three-colour halftone was achieved through the use of gum bichromate over platinum.

 

166 - Alfred Stieglitz
Hoboken, New Jersey, 1864 – New York, 1946
The City of Ambition
1910
Photogravure
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949

Inspired by Alvin Langdon Coburn’s recent photography of the New York docks, Stieglitz executed this image in 1910, publishing it in Camera Work the following year as part of a series dedicated to New York. An emotive title (he changed “ambitions” to “ambition”) captures the spirit of this study of skyscrapers and industrial smoke, streaming outward in white like so many jubilant ribbons, against the cloud-swept sky, asserting the promising new world of modern life. The tallest skyscraper in the background is the Singer Building.

 

167 - Paul Strand
New York, 1890 – Orgeval, France, 1976
Wall Street, New York
1915
Mercury-toned platinum print
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive, 1971

It was Stieglitz who first advanced the career of Paul Strand. Profoundly impressed by Strand’s images when he saw them in 1915, he gave the artist a one-man show at Gallery 291 the following year and featured his work in the last two issues of Camera Work in 1917. Strand’s photograph of Wall Street stands out from Steichen’s works of the period by its rejection of the decorative aestheticism of Pictorialism which had characterized his own early work. Strand’s early exposure to Cubism also contributed to his assertion of the two-dimensionality and abstract structure of the photographic image. To this end Strand’s urban images are often taken from an elevated perspective. Wall Street, New York perfectly expresses this balance between figuration and abstraction, the human figures serving to create animated light and dark patterns against the angled base line. Indeed, humanity is effectively reduced to irregularly spaced units and the harsh, crisp reality of the image is somehow enhanced by the brilliant light, the absence of atmospheric effects and the massing of architecture.

 

168 - Karl Struss
New York, 1886 – New York, 1981
The Avenue (Dusk)
1914–1915
Platinum print
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Struss learned photography in New York under Clarence H. White and became a member of the Photo-Secession group in 1912. Stieglitz published eight of his photographs in Camera Work. A Pictorialist, he was a leading practitioner of the aestheticized, poetic manipulation of images, creating a lens and employing soft focuses long after the peak of the movement in New York around 1915. His early images of New York are among his finest. He moved to California in 1919, becoming a leading cinematographer and one of the most influential advocates of Pictorialism on the West Coast.

 

169 - Frederick Childe Hassam
Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1859 – New York, 1935
Flags on 57th Street, Winter of 1918
1918
Oil on canvas
The New York Historical Society

This painting is one of a group of so-called “Flag” paintings Hassam executed in the American patriotic fervour of the First World War and its immediate aftermath. Most of the works celebrate parades, often down Fifth Avenue and in this case along 57th Street. The artist had a studio on West 57th Street near Sixth Avenue. The subject also provided a marvellous visual potential for his American Impressionist sensibilities: the waving multi-coloured flags; the snow, unique in this series; the traffic and even the modern urban element of the elevated train line at the end of the block. The composition is further animated by the open zigzag of brushstrokes along the street with its steeply ascending perspective. That viewpoint recalls both bird’s-eye photographic urban views and French Impressionist paintings with their own antecedents in Japanese woodblock prints.

 

170 - John Henry Twachtman
Cincinnati, Ohio, 1853 – Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1902
Edge of the Emerald Pool, Yellowstone
About 1895
Oil on canvas
Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas

In autumn 1895 Twachtman visited Yellowstone, America’s first national park, established in 1872. Among the paintings he produced were three of the Emerald Pool, a basin near the Old Faithful geyser. Evidently the basin’s rich colourism of blue, turquoise and green against the stark surroundings attracted him. The cropping of the composition, resulting in a partial angled view of the pool and vapour virtually filling the entire canvas, emphasizes the painter’s abstract formal concerns far more than his other, more topographic depictions. The powerful confrontation with the pool, the striking yet emotionally soothing colourism, and the remarkable abstractness of the scene make it among the most modernist paintings produced in the United States in its time.

 

171 - Marsden Hartley
Lewiston, Maine, 1877 – Ellsworth, Maine, 1943
Storm Clouds, Maine
1906–1907
Oil on canvas
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, Hudson Walker Collection, 1954

During the fall of 1906 the young Hartley opened an art studio in Lewiston, Maine, where he offered art classes. While the venture was not a success, it solidified his resolve to devote himself to a painting career and resulted in this picture. Using a limited palette, Hartley created an extraordinarily dramatic composition with intensely romantic overtones, presenting the mountain, with its zigzag of autumnal-orange foliage echoing the thunderclouds overhead, and the ominous sky surging over its peak, creating a dynamic confrontation between the rising storm and the earth below. Colour and formalist devices articulate a profound, subjective response to Nature.

 

172 - Marsden Hartley
Lewiston, Maine, 1877 – Ellsworth, Maine, 1943
White Birches
1908
Oil on canvas
Saint Louis Art Museum
Friends Fund

Another picture executed in the mountains of Maine, this work reflects the increased influence of modernist painting on the artist, who had become aware of the work of the Swiss artist Giovanni Segantini in the German cultural magazine Jugend. Hartley had been especially struck with the artist’s breaking up of intense colours in defining forms and his use of short, open brushstrokes. Hartley thickly applied brilliant colours, setting them off against each other in intense, close juxtapositions. Furthermore, traditional perspective begins to dissolve against the arch confrontation of colour fields. The previously unknown artist leapt into the avant-garde mainstream the following year with the exhibition of his Maine landscapes at Stieglitz’s Gallery 291.

 

173 - Tom Thomson
Claremont, Ontario, 1877 – Canoe Lake, Ontario, 1917
In Algonquin Park
1914
Oil on canvas
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario
Gift of the Founders, Robert and Signe McMichael, in memory of Norman and Evelyn McMichael

The subject of this painting derives from a sketch Thomson executed in Algonquin Provincial Park, where he would go on canoe trips with fellow artists who would later constitute the Group of Seven, notably A. Y. Jackson, with whom he shared a studio. An early appreciation of the Arts and Crafts movement (with its integration of the arts and aesthetics based on an honest, direct communion with Nature) and an intense pleasure in the time spent in Northern Ontario wilderness expressed themselves through an increasingly accomplished orchestration of assertive colour, composition and lighting effects. Through his artistic circle, Thomson absorbed the influence of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Scandinavian painting.

 

174 - Tom Thomson
Claremont, Ontario, 1877 – Canoe Lake, Ontario, 1917
In the Northland
1915
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Purchase, subscription

This celebrated work, also derived from a sketch made in Algonquin Park and datable to the fall of 1914, represents Thomson at the mastery of his style: the painting is at once strongly decorative in its pattern of colours and its arrangement of shadows and trees, and intensely evocative in its presentation of the Northern Ontario countryside in autumn. For all its apparent directness, the work is carefully composed, with the diagonal of the fallen tree drawing the eye into the space it asserts, and the strong yet limited colour ranges, the powerful juxtapositions of richly applied strokes of oranges and cream-whites against resonant deep blues, judiciously orchestrated.

 

175 - Lawren Stewart Harris
Brantford, Ontario, 1885 – Vancouver, 1970
Snow Fantasy
About 1917
Oil on canvas
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario
Gift of Keith and Edith MacIver

This painting, one of a series of snow scenes of the Ontario north executed between 1915 and 1918, embodies Harris’s talent for combining assertive decorative surface design with the direct experience of Nature, influenced by contemporary Scandinavian painters. Harris had seen the 1913 Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo with J.E.H. MacDonald, and Gustav Fjaestad’s paintings of snow-covered fir trees had particularly appealed to him. The controlled palette, consisting of mauves, greens and whites against isolated touches of complementary colours and a creamy yellow horizon, enhances the decorative effect.

 

176 - David Milne
Burgoyne, Ontario, 1882 – Bancroft, Ontario, 1953
The Boulder
1916
Oil on canvas
The Winnipeg Art Gallery
Acquired with the assistance of the Women’s Committee and The Winnipeg Foundation

Born in Ontario, Milne received his early training at the Art Students League in New York. He remained in that city, working as an illustrator, and became known for his experimental painting style influenced by Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and the art of Maurice Prendergast (nos. 133, 134, 135). Although invited to participate in the 1913 Armory Show, he became frustrated by his lack of career advancement in New York and moved to Boston Corners in the lower Berkshires of New York State in 1916. The Boulder is typical of his work of this period, in which white and a limited range of colours are used to define the shapes and surfaces of rocks and vegetation.

 

177 - Alexander Young Jackson
Montreal, 1882 – Kleinburg, Ontario, 1974
The Red Maple
1914
Oil on wood panel
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario
Gift of Mr. S. Walter Stewart

 

178 - Alexander Young Jackson
Montreal, 1882 – Kleinburg, Ontario, 1974
The Red Maple
1914
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

In the fall of 1914 Tom Thomson and A. Y. Jackson, who shared a studio in Toronto in a building that Lawren Harris had partially financed, travelled to Algonquin Provincial Park. The two artists painted with Arthur Lismer and Frederick Varley in this inspiring natural setting. It was during October that Jackson created the sketches used for the painting The Red Maple, a work completed immediately upon his return to the studio in November. That work is among his most radical in terms of its extremely decorative composition, its monumental directness and the artist’s use of single brushstrokes of unmodified colours. The painting’s faithfulness to his visual experience is underlined by the remarkable correlation between the small, rapidly executed oil sketch and the final painting.

 

179 - Georgia O’Keeffe
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887 – Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1986
Anything (Red and Green Trees)
1916
Oil on board
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation

The period of 1914 to 1916 was crucial to the future of O’Keeffe’s stylistic development. It was during this time in New York that she became familiar with and internalized the tenets of leading currents in French contemporary art, including Cubism and Kandinsky’s theories of colour. Alfred Stieglitz and his Gallery 291 were crucial to this transformation. Her return to Texas in 1916–1917 provided her with the possibility to consolidate these lessons in her landscapes, minimizing forms and asserting strident, vivid and emotive colours. It is particularly interesting to compare these extraordinary paintings with Coburn’s nearly contemporary photographs (nos. 50, 180, 182). Coburn, who had been closely associated with Stieglitz since the previous decade and was a member of the Photo-Secessionist movement, also exploited the potentiality of the vast, crisply profiled and inspiring Southwestern landscape in his toned platinum prints. He converted the panoramas into abstract studies of monumental blocks created through sharp juxtapositions of light and dark, much as O’Keeffe did in her colour fields. Both artists convey the grandeur of their subjects and a spiritual affinity with Nature.

 

180 - Alvin Langdon Coburn
Boston, 1882 – Rhos-on-Sea, Wales, 1966
The Great Temple, Grand Canyon
1911
Gum platinum print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn

 

181 - Georgia O’Keeffe
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887 – Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1986
Red Landscape
1916–1917
Oil on board
Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas
Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation

 

182 - Alvin Langdon Coburn
Boston, 1882 – Rhos-on-Sea, Wales, 1966
Grand Canyon
About 1912
Gum platinum print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn

 

183 - Alexander Young Jackson
Montreal, 1882 – Kleinburg, Ontario, 1974
Terre Sauvage
1913
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

In 1913 Jackson shared a studio with Lawren Harris and painted what would be his largest work, Terre Sauvage, originally titled The Northland. The intensity suggested by the title is reflected in the rhythmic, gestural and intense application of forms and colours. The painting reflects the influence of recent Northern European painting, so championed by Harris and MacDonald after their trip in January of that year to the exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian artists in Buffalo. The direct source of the subject was a trip the artist had made north to Georgian Bay that spring. The work fascinated Tom Thomson, who witnessed its gestation in Jackson’s shared studio.

 

184 - Rockwell Kent
Tarrytown, New York, 1882 – Au Sable Forks, New York, 1971
Cranberrying, Monhegan
About 1907
Oil on canvas
Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago
Gift of Mr. Dan Burne Jones

Kent received his early artistic training in New York. He had entered Columbia University with the intention to become an architect but began studying art with William Merritt Chase (no. 125), Abbott Thayer and especially Robert Henri (no. 153), a progressive teacher. Henri encouraged innovation among his students. In 1903 Henri had visited Maine, urging his students to go there for motifs. In 1905, Kent moved to Monhegan Island, Maine, sixteen kilometres off the coast, working in isolation on the island intermittently until 1911 to develop a personal style. The resulting paintings, which he first exhibited in 1907 in New York, where they were well received, compared favourably to the simplicity, power and directness of Winslow Homer’s late landscapes (no. 21).

 

185 - Tom Thomson
Claremont, Ontario, 1877 – Canoe Lake, Ontario, 1917
Northern Lights
About 1916–1917
Oil on panel
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Purchase, A. Sidney Dawes Fund

This small gem of a painting, generally dated to the spring of 1916, is one of five sketches the artist painted of this subject roughly between 1915 and 1917. The vibrant and nearly abstract composition of this nocturnal study, the passionate, bold brushstrokes and brilliant colours against the severe blackness of the tree line below, and the starry sky above make it among the most dramatic of his works. According to a ranger who knew the artist, Thomson would observe the borealis for an extended period from his camp at Algonquin Park. He would then paint his impressions in his lamp-lit cabin either immediately or shortly thereafter, while the memory was still vivid.

 

186 - James Edward Hervey MacDonald
Durham, England, 1873 – Toronto, 1932
The Elements
1916
Oil on board
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Gift of Dr. Lorne Pierce, Toronto, 1958, in memory of Edith Chown Pierce (1890–1954)

The Elements is an image inspired by the rugged Jack-Knife Island in Georgian Bay. The rocks, boulders and scrub pines against the complementarily imagined sky pattern, the colours acidic and arbitrary, overwhelm the figures about the campfire on the beach and convey the interrelation between earth and the heavens as well as the power of Nature in a hostile mood. After the painting was exhibited in Toronto in 1916, where it baffled critics and received negative comments for its “grotesque” and “chaotic … convulsive” shapes, the artist reworked the sky without compromising the picture’s intensity. MacDonald replied at the time that the painting embodied “a big idea, the spirit of our native land” (Toronto Globe, March 27, 1916).

 

187 - Arthur Garfield Dove
Canandaigua, New York, 1880 – Long Island, New York, 1946
Sun on the Lake
1938
Oil, wax and resin on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Gift of William H. and Saundra B. Lane and Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection, Bequest of Robert J. Edwards and Gift of the Misses Hannah Marcy and Grace Edwards, by exchange

The final two paintings in this exhibition are selected as an epilogue to Expanding Horizons, demonstrating the continuity of American and Canadian landscape painting traditions in the evocation of Man’s relation to Nature well into the twentieth century. Dove’s explorations into the abstract always remained grounded in the experience of Nature, and his fascination with the cosmic rhythm of life was expressed through expanding, concentric rings of colour. The sun, symbolically, colouristically and formally, presented a transcendent opportunity for the artist to express this greater harmony. Working outward, “extracting,” as he called it, from Nature, he presented spiritual verities through his visionary style.

 

188 - Lawren Stewart Harris
Brantford, Ontario, 1885 – Vancouver, 1970
Lake Superior
1927
Oil on canvas
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
Gift of the artist, Lawren S. Harris, in memory of his uncle, William Kilborne Stewart, through the Friends of Dartmouth Library

This painting has an interesting history. While its precise date is disputed between the 1920s and the 1940s, we know that it is based on studies the artist executed in 1925. However it does not feature in an inventory of works left behind in Toronto in 1934, when Harris went to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, for four years, returning definitively to Canada in 1944. Harris himself referred to the painting in a letter of 1951 to Dartmouth, stating, “I want to do a little work on it” before presenting it to the college. A similar composition in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts dates to the 1920s. The artist first ventured to the austere northern shores of Lake Superior in 1921, returning there the next several years. The site’s barren splendour and sharp contrasts as well as its purity and sublimity offered him an ideal format to express his beliefs in the greater cosmic harmonies of Nature and Man’s fulfillment through it. As in Dove’s painting, the sunlight, here reflecting over the water and irradiating the complementary cloud formations above, conveys a spiritual grace.

 

189 - John Frederick Kensett
Cheshire, Connecticut, 1816 – New York, 1872
On the Hudson
1855
Oil on canvas
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Gift of the family of Dr. F. Wolferstan Thomas