Three Mile Lake, near Burk’s Falls, 1934

Laing Galleries, Toronto Private Collection, Toronto

Dorothy M. Farr, J.W. Beatty, 1869-1941, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, 1981, page 38

J.W. Beatty sought to depict the Canadian landscape as a patriotic statement. He was a forerunner to the Group of Seven, sharing with them a nationalist pride in painting a uniquely Canadian landscape. “Three Mile Lake, Near Burk’s Falls” demonstrates the increasingly lighter and more decorative palette of Beatty’s paintings throughout his career. The artist abandoned the dark and moody colour scheme of the traditional French and Dutch schools, selecting a vibrant orange for the autumn leaves on the trees. The enchanting farm landscape was painted later in the artist’s career, when he was in his sixties, shortly before he fell permanently ill. During this time, Beatty painted exclusively Ontario landscapes; he was known as one of the first painters to discover Algonquin Park and other areas of wilderness north of Toronto, such as Three Mile Lake in the Muskoka region. Following Beatty’s death in 1941, Helen Bannerman remarks on the artist’s pleasing and patriotic artistic oeuvre, stating: “There is a cheerful zest about Beatty’s work that is most refreshing in these jaded times, when most artists, particularly young ones, are obsessed with a ‘message’. Beatty bothers with no message except perhaps an unconscious one urging us to glory in the beauties of Canadian landscape as he does.”