Provenance

Estate of the artist

by descent to a private collection

Roberts Gallery, Toronto

Private collection, Toronto

Exhibited

Art Gallery of Ontario, Franklin Carmichael, paintings, watercolours and prints, 1970,

No. 20.

Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Franklin Carmichael Watercolours,

Sep. 3 – Oct. 30, 1981

Illustrated

Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Franklin Carmichael Watercolours, 1981,

Plate #7.

There is a larger version of this watercolour in the Art Gallery of Hamilton collection.

Lawren Harris and A. Y. Jackson had first visited the North Shore of Lake Superior after a fall sketching trip to Algoma in 1921. Together, they returned in three subsequent years and, in 1925, invited Carmichael to accompany them. Although Carmichael had been to the Killarney wilderness and to the rugged lands of the Ottawa Valley, this trip was his first to truly remote country. The area has little of the settlement of the more eastern regions, and its landscape is more desolate and barren. Its colours are colder and darker, although the southern sun slanting across the lake in the fall can produce dazzling and melodramatic effects. Carmichael sketched in watercolour on both the 1925 trip to Lake Superior and again in 1926. His choice was influenced by his renewed commitment to the medium. In addition, aware that both Harris and Jackson were making their fifth trip to the region, he may have chosen watercolour as a medium uniquely his, less subject to the influence of the others’ approaches. Although the use of watercolour to depict the Lake Superior landscape was probably experimental, Carmichael was quite satisfied with the results as his contribution to the Small Pictures Exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists in November consisted of only these works. The paintings show a style and handling very much the artists own. While Harris paintings of the period are increasingly abstracted and reduced in colour and form, Carmichael delights in the interplay of the receding masses of the hills, enlivened by patches of brilliantly coloured vegetation. A fascination with the changing pattern of the skies is evident in his rendition of banks of clouds, overlapping and intersected by shafts of light or distant showers. The paint is applied in thin washes, often allowing the paper’s whiteness to break through, enlivening the surface and conveying the experience of movement and light.