Exhibited
“Franklin Carmichael: paintings, water colours and prints”, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, travelling to Orillia Public Library, Orillia; York Public Library, Toronto; Museum and Art Centre, Sudbury; Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound; Cobourg Art Gallery, Cobourg; Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa; Barrie Art Club, Barrie; London Public Library and Art Museum, London, 1970-1971, cat. no. 1
“Franklin Carmichael Centennial Show”, Arts and Letters Club, Toronto, April 1 - May 19, 1990, cat. no. 9
Literature
Megan Bice, “Light and Shadow: The Work of Franklin Carmichael”, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, 1990
It was in 1920, around the time that this sketch was painted, that Franklin Carmichael became one of the founding artists to form Toronto’s landscape painting collective, the Group of Seven (1920- 32). This oil sketch is a classic example of his painting style during the early 1920s. Informed by the loose brushwork of Impressionism, and a palette strong in hue, Carmichael observes the onset of late summer and early fall in a pageantry of autumn colours as oranges and yellows of the changing birch tree leaves peek through in the middle ground. The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson were each engaged by the fall season and for them it was essential to use colour. They explained the matter succinctly in their 1921 and 1922 catalogues statements: “It is as impossible to depict the autumn pageantry of our northern woods with a lead pencil.” Pictures they explained “must speak for themselves...the painter must rely on paint not on adjectives.”
From sketches like this one, Carmichael developed his important easel paintings of autumn, such as the Art Gallery of Ontario’s “Autumn Hillside”, 1920 and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s “Autumn, Orillia”, 1924. In them, Carmichael worked out his ideas for possible enlarged easel paintings. “Study of Trees, Autumn”, a title probably added posthumously to the back of this work since it is not in the artist’s handwriting, is not known to have been developed into an easel painting. Nonetheless, he considered it exhibition ready as he signed it with his rectangular signature bar on the lower right. Carmichael had developed that signature bar in one of his early works of decorated lettering, “Milton on His Blindness” in 1912, held in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
In this sketch are the beginnings of Carmichael’s masterful handling of light and shadow, qualities which would define his work in the 1930s. Using a balanced composition of almost equal land and sky, he created a patchwork of foreground shadows which contrast with the illuminated clearing just before the evergreen trees. Beyond, a screen of deciduous trees, already stripped of fall colour, is contrasted against an almost clear blue sky with one narrow cloud hovering above the horizon. Common to his oils of this period is a pronounced use of secondary colours—here orange and green, made of the primaries red and yellow, and yellow and blue.
Carmichael used several different boards to create his oil sketches. In the twenties, he often worked on an incorporated product called Beaverboard, made of compressed fibreboard building materials. Its advantages include its light weight for plein air sketching. It was widely used in the modern period by artists including American painter Grant Wood (1891-1942). It also easily facilitated inscriptions, as Carmichael made on the verso of this work in black cursive. Rarely did Carmichael give specific or descriptive titles to his sketches in the early twenties, simply calling each one “Sketch” and adding a number to them when they were exhibited to avoid confusion. On the back of his work, he has inscribed “Sketch” above his signature, and to the right the number 10 circled. These may be very important details for in the Group of Seven exhibitions of 1920 and 1921, he showed ten sketches (cats. 5-14) and in 1921 he showed seven sketches (cat. 5-11). Although we can’t be certain, it is possible that sketch “10” was included in either of these exhibitions.
After Carmichael passed away in 1945, it was some time before his work was recognized in solo exhibitions, the first of which took place in his birth town of Orillia, Ontario in 1961, organized by the Orillia Artist’s Guild. An important artist in the Toronto art scene where
he lived for most of his career, his work was also the subject of an important provincial touring exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1970-71, “Franklin Carmichael: paintings, water colours and prints”, which toured to eight venues. This sketch was included in that exhibit, as well as the Franklin Carmichael Centennial Show, Arts and Letters Club, Toronto in 1990, marking the 100th year of the artist’s birth.
