A Hill Path, High Park by James Edward Hervey MacDonald
J.E.H. MacDonald
A Hill Path, High Park
oil on board
signed and dated 1907 lower right
10 x 8 ins ( 25.4 x 20.3 cms )
Auction Estimate: $20,000.00 - $30,000.00
Price Realized $27,600.00
Sale date: November 22nd 2016
Collection of Albert H. Robson
By descent to the current Private Collection, Ontario
Ontario Society of Artists, 35th Annual Exhibition, Toronto, February 23 - March 20, 1907
Paul Duval, “The Tangled Garden: The Art of J.E.H. MacDonald”, Scarborough, 1978, pages 16-20, 26, 43 and 53
“Late Albert H. Robson Praised for Services”, “Montreal Gazette”, October 7, 1939, page 10
As the Art Director at both Grip Limited and Rous & Mann, Robson acted as supervisor to many notable Canadian artists, including members of the Group of Seven. It is thought that this artwork was likely a gift from MacDonald to Robson during that time.
Soon after honeymooning with his new wife, Harriet Joan Lavis, in 1899, MacDonald rented a small cottage on Quebec Avenue near High Park, eventually building a permanent home on the same street. While taking afternoon art classes at the Central Ontario School
of Art and Design, the artist often sketched outdoors in High Park. The area offered MacDonald acres of all manner of landscape from wooded areas, open fields and bodies of water to explore a range of artistic opportunities for the young artist in all seasons. Many of the artist’s oil sketches accomplished in this venue developed into larger canvases and was a constant artistic touchstone.
The rolling hills of the park were a prominent fixture in his works of High Park allowing the artist to examine a layered landscape rather than the flat horizons of traditional landscape art. Forced perspective positions the viewer at the base of the hill, hidden within the treeline gazing up at the picturesque landscape as the path narrows and disappears into the distance.
In this charming scene, the impact of European Impressionism can be seen in MacDonald’s handling of light and shadow with shorter brushstrokes. The long shadows cast by the wooded area, patterning the lush grass and pathway with low soft pink cloud forms signalling the late afternoon glow of an approaching sunset indicate MacDonald’s exploration into capturing atmosphere and his life-long love of cloud-effects. Importantly, there is the introduction of figures in this early work. The mother and child stroll up the path in the distance, perhaps returning home at the close of their afternoon in the park. Here, there is the suggestion of narrative, but the figures act more as an element of the landscape rather than the central focus of the composition.
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James Edward Hervey MacDonald
(1873 - 1932) Group of Seven, OSA, RCA
James Edward Hervey MacDonald, painter was born in Durham, England on 12 May 1873. Among the Group of Seven, of which he was a founder, J.E.H. MacDonald was one of the best trained, first at the Hamilton Art School from about 1887 and, after 1889, in Toronto lithography houses and at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design, where he studied with William Cruikshank. In 1895 he joined Grip Ltd, an important commercial art firm, where he encouraged the staff (which included Tom Thomson from about 1907) to develop as painters. MacDonald was a key member of the later Group. Lawren Harris recalled that a show of MacDonald's in 1912 at the Ontario Society of Artists gave him his first recognition of the Group's "ethos."
MacDonald was Harris's greatest early friend among the Toronto painting community. Together in 1913 they went to the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, to see the survey of Scandinavian landscape painting which was to influence their work. Around this time MacDonald introduced more colour into his dark panels. Algoma, north of Lake Superior, which he visited several times with Harris's help from 1919, became the country of his heart. His best paintings were done there, often of great vistas in a turbulent, patterned style. The sketch Mist Fantasy, Sand River, Algoma (1920, National Gallery of Canada) shows how he used the sketches he made in Algoma: the finished canvas (1922, now in the Art Gallery of Ontario), with its long ribbons of mist, was noted by a later critic as the height of MacDonald's way of stylizing form. In 1924 he made the first of 7 trips to the Rockies, another favourite painting place.
MacDonald's palette was dark, tough and rich, like A.Y. Jackson's, but his colouring was more fiery and his style more elegant. His sense of composition was oriented towards his meditation on design, a subject in which he was a master (he was the greatest calligrapher of the period and a designer of consequence). Like other members of the Group, he loved Chinese and Japanese art.
Among other tasks he performed was the decoration of St Anne's Church, Toronto (1923), and teaching at the Ontario College of Art. He also wrote poetry after a nervous breakdown in 1917. He was an eccentric gardener and enjoyed playing on a set of chimes made of old plough points. One of his favourite authors was Henry David Thoreau, for whom he named his son, illustrator Thoreau MacDonald. The artist died in Toronto on 26 November 1932.
