PROVENANCE
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 15, 2013, lot 173
Private Collection, Toronto

Georgian Bay was Arthur Lismer’s favourite painting site over many decades. The Sheffield-born artist first visited the Bay in 1913 and it was there he later painted the sketch for his well-known painting September Gale, Georgian Bay of 1921 (National Gallery of Canada). His consistent theme was windblown trees on bare rocky islands creatively reinterpreted in numerous variations. After teaching in South Africa and New York in the 1930s, Lismer returned to Canada and moved to Montreal in 1940. In the summer of 1943, he and his wife and daughter stayed at Copperhead, north of their usual spot at Manitou Dock on Georgian Bay.

In 1940 and 1942 Lismer painted in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The paintings resultant from these trips differed considerably from his earlier landscapes, focusing on arrangements of killicks and dock litter, effectively still lifes painted out of doors. In Shoreline, Georgian Bay, Lismer abandoned his usual motif to depict rocks and driftwood on a rocky beach. These objects compose the still life that is arranged vertically and framed by the water on the horizon and a rocky form to the left. The curves of the rocks by the water’s edge are echoed in the islets upper right. Lismer is no longer interested in the more dramatic forces of nature, but the natural detritus scattered by those forces and their resulting formal arrangements. Sunlight hits the water upper centre and illuminates this superb still life of objects in nature.

We thank Charles C. Hill, former curator of Canadian art from 1980 to 2014 at the National Gallery of Canada and author of The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, for contributing the above essay.

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