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Inventory # A22S-E21044-001

ARCA G7 OSA
1881 - 1969
Canadian

Iceberg
oil on canvas, 1938
signed and with the artist's thumbprint and on verso inscribed "special" and stamped with the Varley Inventory #550
16 x 20 in, 40.6 x 50.8 cm

PROVENANCE
A gift from the Artist to a Private Collector, Vancouver
By descent to the present Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Christopher Varley, F.H. Varley: A Centennial Exhibition, Edmonton Art Gallery, 1981, pages 138, 140 and 142
Peter Varley, Frederick H. Varley, 1983, page 148
Maria Tippett, Stormy Weather: F.H. Varley, A Biography, 1998, page 237


From his first view of a show of the Arctic paintings of Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson in 1931 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Frederick Varley dreamed of a trip to the Far North. On July 4, 1938, he received an invitation from Charles Camsell, the deputy minister of Mines and Resources, to join the government supply ship the RMS Nascopie on its annual patrol trip through the Arctic. Varley scrambled to assemble his supplies, and five days later, on July 9, he left Montreal to join the Nascopie on a trip that spanned 12,246 miles and went as far north as Thule, Greenland. His cabin mate on this journey was the Royal Ontario Museum’s ornithologist Terry M. Shortt. In their cramped quarters, Shortt dissected birds for his research while Varley sketched, in a creative jumble of biology and art. In spite of this, Varley reported that they “[got] on excellently.”

This trip was fortuitous – Varley was entranced with the Arctic, and in late August he wrote:

I’m more drunk than ever in my life – drunk with the seemingly impossible – the glaciers up the Greenland coast & the weather rounded mountains – the icebergs – literally hundreds of them, floating sphinxes – pyramids – mountain peaks with castles on them – draw-bridges & crevasses, huge cathedrals – coral forms magnified a thousand fold – fangs of teeth hundreds of feet high – strange caves giving out in front of them the intense singing violet of space until the cave is as unreal as a dream.

Varley was inspired and worked feverishly, bringing back a wealth of work in watercolour, pencil, crayon and oil sketches. As the Nascopie traveled farther north, he encountered trouble with the plasticity of his oils due to cold, and Shortt generously gave Varley about 200 sheets of his own paper so he could continue painting with watercolours.

Varley’s subjects were most often Inuit in the landscape or in their settlements and views across the ocean to mountainous shores, making this subject of a close-up of an iceberg uncommon. Further, Christopher Varley related that the artist “appears to have only worked up three oils based on Arctic material,” making this canvas exceedingly rare. Maria Tippett notes the possible reason in Stormy Weather, writing that “when Varley returned from the Arctic he told a friend that he ‘felt it would be hardly worthwhile to paint up his sketches, for no one in this country would buy the canvases.’ Nonetheless, he could not resist doing so.” One of this special group of canvases, Arctic Landscape, circa 1940, was acquired by the National Gallery.

The experience of the long days of Arctic summer, with their prolonged sunset and sunrise light effects, was magical for Varley. He was struck by the iridescent quality of the light. So eager was he to paint the landscape at every hour of the day and night that he hardly slept. In Iceberg, the form of the central berg resembles a huge stump, massive and sculptural, its extraordinary form dominating the landscape. It is easy to imagine Varley’s excitement on contemplating its unique shape.

Comparisons can be made to the magnificent Arctic iceberg paintings of fellow Group of Seven painter Harris, with their clear and transcendent light and highlighting of the sculptural qualities of the ice forms. However, Varley’s works differ from Harris’s cool, spiritually resonant images in his romantic response to the beauty of the long sunsets and sunrises, his varied use of colour, and his textural, sensuous brush-strokes. Varley stated that “under such conditions one lives in prismatic colours.”

Iceberg is a rare and beautiful masterwork, an iconic image of the Arctic. It embodies Varley’s acute sensitivity to colour and contains the hues of blue, green and purple so particular to his unique palette, perfected while living in Vancouver. The artist’s visceral approach to mass brings solidity to cloud and iceberg. The opaque ocean surges against the monumental ice form, with whitecaps marking its surface, while clouds scud across the sky, bathed in an ethereal glow, making this painting alive with atmospheric and oceanic movement.

On September 30, Varley disembarked at Halifax and returned to Ottawa. This would be his only trip to the Arctic, one of the great experiences of his life, and this remarkable canvas is a treasure resulting from that voyage.

This work is #550 in the Varley Inventory listing, titled as Iceberg.

Available for viewing at: Heffel Calgary - 220 Manning Road NE, Unit 1080

All prices are in Canadian Dollars


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