Artwork by James Edward Hervey MacDonald,  Larches, Mountain Lake

J.E.H. MacDonald
Larches, Mountain Lake

oil on board
signed and dated “Sept. 13, 1929” lower right; signed and titled (twice) on the reverse
8.5 x 10.5 ins ( 21.6 x 26.7 cms )

Auction Estimate: $70,000.00$50,000.00 - $70,000.00

Price Realized $57,600.00
Sale date: June 9th 2021

Provenance:
Private Collection, Toronto
Private Collection, Ontario
Masters Gallery, Calgary
Private Collection, Vancouver
1929 was J.E.H. MacDonald’s sixth visit to the Lake O’Hara region of Yoho National Park, British Columbia, in the Rocky Mountains of western Canada. He was obsessed with the scenery there, and that year, his attention was taken by the larch trees. He arrived in early September (as we know from a sketch painted on the 5th) to find the larches beginning to turn. The weather conditions that fall, his familiarity with the trails and meadows, and his utter delight in being back in a place he so loved, combined to give us an artistic survey of the Lyall’s Larch in their fullest range of fine autumnal glory.

These uniquely charming, deciduous conifers have leaf-like needles that change colour in the fall. In MacDonald’s 1929 paintings we see in them dancing from shades of green through to gold, charting the transition of their bright, forest green leaves from their summer colours through an intense chartreuse green, then a pale lime green that then morphs into a soft buttery yellow, and finally ripens to a saffron orange over the winter as the four-sided leaves dry out and fall. Sprinkled on the early snow, or as seen in this work against the blue-green waters of McArthur Lake and the heath-crusted ground, they are a delightful and attractive colour contract in the landscape. MacDonald further accentuates these two solitary trees by bathing them in sunlight that electrifies their colours and heightens our focus on them. They are actors, posing at centre stage. He underlines this focus by capturing the foreground tree’s deeply cast shadow in a rich brown tinged with purple that is not only reminiscent of the greyish-purple of larch bark, but repeated in the shadow on the rock face on the far side of the lake, drawing our eye up to the mountain face. MacDonald was a superb colourist who used a minimal palette of carefully chosen hues in a simple composition. The purple accents in “Larches, Mountain Lake” serve to intensify the colour of the larches, and together with his calligraphic brushwork, and stage-like view, create a scene that is enlivened and bright. One can almost feel the breeze tousling the supple branches of these two young larch trees.

MacDonald was not only visually taken by these unique trees, he also wrote about them in his journals, even composing poems, odes to their kaleidoscopic fall colour. In his 1924 lecture “A Glimpse of the West”, delivered to his students at the Ontario College of Art and published that November in “The Canadian Bookman”, he wrote of his affection of the O’Hara landscape, singling out the larch trees, “...and there are the trees, the spruce and the balsam and the plumy Lyall’s Larch. This last especially a beautiful colour note in my memory as it began to get the gold of autumn on it before I came away, and that, with the delicate purple grey of the branches mingling with it made a dream tree of paradise.” In the fall of 1928, he wrote a poem in his journal, describing the advance of fall colour up from the prairies to the mountains:

“But yesterday the sleety wind
Hissed in the mountains larch
And now the yellow prairie spreads
The sheaves in endless march”

The turn of the larches in the Canadian Rockies is a visually delightful time, one that MacDonald was harmoniously in tune with, one that he painted and wrote of often – a recurring character in his Lake O’Hara stories. The shoreline of McArthur Lake, where these two trees are growing in the sketch, is today dotted with older, larger, specimens and their younger offspring. It is likely that among them, gnarled and wizened and shaped by the weather, stand these two same trees, now almost a century older.

We extend our thanks to Lisa Christensen, Canadian art academic and the author of four award-winning books on Canadian art, for contributing the preceding essay.

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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.