Falling Leaves

Collection of the Artist Gordon Conn, Toronto, 1965 Private Collection, Ontario

“Canadian Small Pictures”, Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, 1931, no. 732

Joan Murray, “Mary Wrinch”, Canadian Antiques Collector, Volume 4, September 1969, page 17

Mary Wrinch was an early modernist, who painted in the Ontario North prior to the advent of the Group of Seven. She studied with George Agnew Reid at the Central Ontario College of Art, then remained a close friend of Reid and his wife, painter Mary Hiester Reid, and after Mary Hiester died in 1921, she married him. She had a refreshingly unpretentious take on making art, with a nod to Post Impressionism and its preoccupation with pictorial structure, strong colour and bold handling. Mary Wrinch`s “Falling Leaves” is an exercise in pattern. The trees are echoed in the water; the water reflects their colour and the sky. The banks of the stream are set off by black paint to either side. Amid a network of repeated forms, the structure of the painting is firmly anchored by the dark colours Wrinch used to outline and enhance specific areas. Works from the 1920s and 1930s are her landmarks and in them she energetically explored artistic process, colour and semi-abstraction in and around two dimensions. The bold design of “Falling Leaves” suggests Wrinch`s long-held knowledge of Paul Gauguin and the Nabis, the group of artists particularly influenced by Gauguin's expressive use of colour and rhythmic pattern. Wrinch knew of Gauguin from her friend, painter Harriet Ford, and also may have thought here of Gauguin's style with its vigour and decorative simplicity and sought to use her understanding of his work to heighten the effect of this quiet, intimate space and the sparkling beauty of the Canadian landscape. The artist valued this work and liked the composition and colour so much that she made a colour block print of it titled, appropriately, “Falling Leaves”. She also painted a larger canvas with the title “Falling Leaves”, an oil on board, 16 x 13 inches (sold at Sotheby's Canada, May 15, 1973, lot 238). She kept the sketch until shortly before her death.