Rock Pools-Cloche Hills, 1960

Roberts Gallery, Toronto Damkjar-Burton Gallery, Hamilton Private Collection, Toronto

Margaret Gray, Margaret Rand and Lois Steen, “A.J. Casson”, Agincourt, Ontario, 1976, page 50

As one of Canada’s most prominent landscape painters, Alfred Joseph Casson was loyal to the wilderness and villages of Ontario. “Rock Pools-Cloche Hills” portrays one of the artist’s preferred subjects for many years, the La Cloche Mountains. Teeming with mood from dramatic shadows and cloud formations, the painting is an exemplary representation of Casson’s famed landscape paintings. The La Cloche range in Northern Ontario along the north shore of Lake Huron was a regular painting destination for Casson. Painted in 1960 when the artist was 62, and two years after leaving Sampson Matthews Limited to paint fulltime, Casson depicts the view looking over the rocky landscape towards the mountains in the distance. In “Rock Pools-Cloche Hills”, Casson uses his extremely design‒oriented approach to the composition, limiting his palette and reducing the landscape to simplified forms to capture the atmosphere of a cloudy day in Northern Ontario. Deft handling of shades of green is perhaps Casson’s most well-known trademark. As the artist stated, “One day I saw a Velasquez painting of Phillip IV of Spain. The only discernable colours were brown, black, silver and rose. That started me on simple, restricted colour schemes.” Casson also attributed his restricted colour palette to his thirty-year career as a graphic designer. The specifications of projects forced Casson to use his ingenuity when working with colour.