PROVENANCE
Roberts Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

In 1919, when the prominent commercial art firm Rous & Mann Ltd. hired A.J. Casson, the Group of Seven were already working together. Some of its future members supported themselves through commercial work, and one of these, Franklin Carmichael, was a senior designer at Rous & Mann. Casson was assigned to work under him, a pairing that proved advantageous for both artists.

Casson was young and inexperienced in the wider world of art. Carmichael, eight years older, found Casson eager and talented. He worked closely with him; they began to sketch together, and Carmichael introduced Casson to the future members of the Group. He also took him to the Arts and Letters Club, where Casson had his first solo show in 1920, after which he began to exhibit regularly. Carmichael shared Casson’s respect for the medium of watercolour and they would, along with Frederick Brigden, found the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour in 1925.

Franz Johnston formally withdrew from the Group of Seven in 1924. In 1926, Casson was invited to replace him. He visited the North Shore of Lake Superior with Lawren Harris in 1928, and learned from him the value of simplicity and directness in his work. Casson’s work encompassed many subjects of which landscape was only one; he was equally interested in the structures of small towns, people and figures. He often worked in pencil in the field, and his methods, always rooted in his commercial training, were precise and ordered.

In the later works of Casson, we see three critical elements coming together: his understanding of the screen print, his skilled use of the technique of grisaille, and his desire to simplify and eliminate the non-essential in his work. The grisaille technique entails creating a preliminary painting in shades of grey – or another simple colour – which is then repainted in the final colour scheme. This technique is time-consuming and very carefully preplanned, an entirely different approach than on-the-spot painting. It results in a wonderfully rounded feeling in the final forms, even while, as in Casson’s case, a sense of flatness prevails. It was Casson’s technical understanding of prints that gave his work this quality, unique in the work of the Group.

In Early Summer, Quebec, we see a pink house reposing in the sun. The interplay of pattern, colour and shape in this work exemplifies Casson’s technical abilities. The offset windows on one side of the house provide a contrast of pattern to the balanced windows on the other. The variety of colour and the continued forms of squares and rectangles on the roof echo the windows and doors, both in shape and palette. The interplay between the figures - two standing adults versus the children playing with a wagon on the pathway, a seated man and the leaning woman in the doorway - is all carefully planned and plotted. Even the tree in front of the house, with its sparse leaves and thin trunk, works with the trees behind the house, old and new in contrast. Spots of sunlight on the foreground grass contrast with the linear house, and the smoothly painted sky is full of subtle colour. The only movement in the work is the action of the playing children, the only adornment the millwork on the gabled roof. The fine cross-hatching brushwork reminds us of the hand of the painter in this quiet and still Casson masterwork.

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