Sold for: $25,000

PROVENANCE
Douglas Duncan Picture Loan Society, Toronto
Collection of M.B. Kaplinsky, 1959
Morris Gallery, Toronto
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
Galerie Alan Klinkhoff, Montreal
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
David Milne Jr. and David P. Silcox, David B. Milne: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume 2: 1929 - 1953, 1998, reproduced page 708, catalogue #401.45

EXHIBITED
Hart House, University of Toronto, David Milne, 7-22 January 1962

This work was produced not long after David Milne returned to Toronto in 1939, following a long period spent at Six Mile Lake, Muskoka. He went to Toronto to live permanently with Kathleen Pavey, with whom he had begun a relationship in 1938; they would remain there for just over a year. At this time he was painting almost exclusively in watercolour; the first time he had worked in the medium in earnest since 1925. Perhaps reflecting the joy he was feeling for his new life in the city, these are more immediate, relaxed works, comprising portraits, interiors, urban street scenes and, as here, still lifes. Milne retained his stripped back, interpretive style, with a total primacy given to the use of colour. In Half a Dozen Tulips, we can see colours typical of this period: delicate salmon pinks, transparent ochres and thinned purples in lieu of blacks. His sparing, almost casual painterly technique betrays his compositional insight and skill at painting form and texture, as ceramics, glass and petals are efficiently rendered with minimal line and sheer washes. Restrained yet highly evocative, this is a bright and intimate example of a high point in Milne’s career.

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