Provenance

S. Walter Stewart, Toronto 

By descent to Wendy Stewart

Roberts Gallery, Toronto

A.Y. Jackson on the North Shore of Lake Superior with Lawren Harris.

The Algoma country was too opulent for Harris; he wanted something bare and stark, so at the conclusion of one of our sketching trips to Algoma he and I went to the north shore of Lake Superior, a country much of which had been burnt over years before. New growth was slowly appearing. The C.P.R. main line follows the north shore of Lake Superior from Heron Bay westward to Port Arthur. I know of no more impressive scenery in Canada for the landscape painter. There is a sublime order to it, the long curves of the beaches, the sweeping ranges of hills, and headlands that push out into the lake. Inland there are intimate little lakes, stretches of muskeg, outcrops of rock; there is little soil for agriculture. In the autumn the whole country glows with colour; the huckleberry and the pin cherry turn crimson, the mountain ash is loaded with red berries, the poplar and the birch turn yellow and the Tamarac greenish gold.

In 1923, Harris, Jackson and apparently Lismer went back to the Coldwell area for almost a month. They camped for a while at Port Monroe and then at Pike Lake, leaving for Toronto about October 20.

A Painters Country, the autobiography of A.Y. Jackson, Clakre Irwin, 1958