David Milne was born in Bruce County in southwestern Ontario, but at age 21, he left for the big city and enrolled at the Art Students League of New York. As a student from 1903 to 1905, he was exposed to American and European Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, modernist movements that would stand behind his own unique painting style. By about 1910, Milne’s work was exhibited regularly and reviewed favourably by the New York press. Significantly for an art history of Canadian painters, he exhibited five paintings in the Armory Show (1913), North America’s most impactful and controversial early exhibition of modern art, which was mounted in New York, Boston and Chicago. Through this exhibition Milne came into contact with the contemporary international avant-garde paintings of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Édouard Vuillard that he had begun to see in New York art galleries.

Milne lived in Manhattan and the Bronx for 13 years. As this painting shows, he acquired both an intimate knowledge of and abiding affection for the city. His first known professional exhibition, in 1909, featured a Bronx subject. Milne painted many images of buildings and streets around New York, but In the Bronx II stands out by showing the more verdant side of the metropolis. Shapes of trees and houses compete for dominance in the enclosed space of the canvas. Close to the greenery in hue but also distinct, the buildings are rendered in a bluer green than the trees. The painting is a hybrid of cityscape and landscape.

The late Milne expert David Silcox claimed that “painting, for Milne, was a purely aesthetic activity, not concerned with social problems.… It was not even a process of recording or describing an object or a scene with fidelity or truth. Rather, a painting was a charged world of its own…”[1] His comment chimes with In the Bronx II. With almost no horizon line to provide depth and perspective, the interlocking forms in this painting seem to play on the surface. The tight chromatic range in greens—with white spaces and black structural emphases—draws our attention to the intricacies of pattern. Bright red chimneys catch our eye and move it around the image. The composition forms and reforms like a puzzle. Close up, we see pattern. At a greater remove, the image resolves into a view of a neighbourhood.

Milne constantly challenged himself and his viewers to see differently and with greater intensity. True to that purpose, this scene is restless and fluid, especially because the large green and white form in the centre left foreground refuses to fit with the rest of the picture. We read it as a tree, given its vibrant green canopy and black trunk, but it is not part of the welter of organic and architectural forms that rise behind it. Perhaps this tree is simply closer to our vantage point, but its almost awkward refusal to fit with other patterns animates the entire surface.

We thank Mark A. Cheetham for contributing the above essay. Cheetham is a freelance writer and curator and a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. He has written extensively on Canadian artists, including Jack Chambers, Alex Colville, Robert Houle and Camille Turner.

1. David P. Silcox, Painting Place: The Life and Work of David B. Milne (University of Toronto Press, 1996), 34.