Georgian Bay

Private Collection, Ontario

Sandra Paikowsky, Goodridge Roberts 1904 - 1974, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, 1998, page 157

“Georgian Bay” is exemplary of William Goodridge Roberts' numerous expressive landscape paintings of rural Quebec. The artist had spent his summers of the 1940s painting in a number of different regions of Eastern Canada, including Georgian Bay, Outaouais, the Laurentians, the Eastern Townships and Charlevoix. Roberts was invited by a former student to spend the summer of 1951 at Georgian Bay with his wife Joan. Because of their memorable experience there and Joan’s family ties to Georgian Bay, the couple returned to Ontario almost annually and Georgian Bay became one of the artist’s most recognized landscape sites. Charles Doyon wrote of the silence and solitude of Roberts’ landscapes and if “Georgian Bay seems to be a geographer’s patch-work, Goodridge Roberts has put it back together again in his own way.”