Artwork by James Edward Hervey MacDonald,  Backyard, West Toronto

J.E.H. MacDonald
Backyard, West Toronto

oil on board
signed with initials and dated 1912 lower left; signed, titled, dated 1912 and inscribed “Glenlake House” on the reverse
6.25 x 9.25 ins ( 15.9 x 23.5 cms )

Auction Estimate: $15,000.00$12,000.00 - $15,000.00

Price Realized $14,160.00
Sale date: November 20th 2018

Provenance:
Roberts Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
J.E.H. MacDonald organized the first show of his work at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto in November 1911; Lawren Harris attended the exhibition and was particularly taken with MacDonald’s landscapes, so much that he asked if they could work together. Harris also convinced MacDonald to take up painting as a full-time career, which led him to resign from his position as a designer at Grip Ltd. in 1912. The two painters began to sketch scenes of Toronto and its environs together; MacDonald’s favourite locations to paint were the Humber Valley and High Park. “Backyard, West Toronto” (1912), an example of the artist’s Toronto scenes of this period, is painted in loose brushstrokes of pastel pigments, evoking MacDonald’s European impressionist influences. This transitionary period signals the drama and atmosphere of the Canadian landscape the artist sought to express in his later Group of Seven period works.

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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.