Tin Basin, Flowers in a Prospector’s Cabin II, 1929 by David Brown Milne

Provenance:
Possibly gift of the Artist to the Kimball Family, Buffalo, New York, 1931 or later
Morris Gallery, Toronto, 1974
R. McKenzie, St. Catherine's, 1974
Morris Gallery, Toronto
Acquired by the present Private Collection, circa 1976

Literature:
David P. Silcox, “Painting Place: The Life and Work of David Milne”, Toronto, 1996, page 201
David Milne Jr. and David P. Silcox, “David B. Milne: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume 2: 1929-1953”, Toronto, 1998, listed and reproduced page 465, no.208.22

David Milne hailed from Bruce County in rural southwestern Ontario and was, in essence, a landscape artist. His painting in the years spent in Boston Corners‒before he enlisted in the army during World War I‒is some of the most esteemed in his highly productive career. Milne left Canada at age 21 to study at the Arts Students’ League there (1903‒05). He came to know both American and European Impressionism, Post‒Impressionism, and Fauvism, quintessentially modern approaches that would shape his own unique style. A significant measure of this early success was his participation in two of North America’s most important exhibitions of avant-garde art in the early 20th century: the famous Armory Show in 1913 (seen in New York, Boston, and Chicago) and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915. Boston Corners, by contrast, had fewer than 100 inhabitants when the Milnes moved there in 1916. This site was a dramatic change from his previous years in crowded New York City, but it was the metropolis that proved to be the exception in his career.

Milne was a particularly keen observer of his immediate surroundings, whether a sweeping landscape, a patch of ground, or objects of interest in his domestic surrounds. He reacted emotionally to his physical situation. For this reason, where he was painting‒and he moved constantly, usually for economic reasons‒is crucial to our understanding of individual works and of periods in his prolific artistic life. In the spring of 1929, he moved to the rugged Temagami area in northeastern Ontario, known for its mining and forestry industries. He painted in the town of Temagami, but of more interest to him were nearby mineshafts and the immediate material traces of prospecting that we see in this painting.

The components named in “Tin Basin, Flowers in a Prospector’s Cabin II” “might seem oddly chosen, but in part thanks to a letter Milne wrote at the time, we have a sense of how typical and indeed significant this and closely related paintings were for him. He had a habit of painting spring flowers every year and went out looking for specimens in May 1929. Unhappy with his first attempt to render them and in need of fresh flowers, he records that the next day “I landed on the same island [in Lake Temagami] and got more flowers, taking them with the ones from the home island in the water pail. I thought of tackling my job in the open, but the shifting light was too threatening, so I paddled across the lake to a prospector’s camp that I had visited before. It has a table and a bench.” It was here that Milne found more still-life objects and incorporated them into his design.

The result, characteristically for Milne, is both carefully planned and executed but also subject to serendipity. A visual essay in curvilinearity and surface effects, the manufactured elements in the composition (plates, bottles) anchor a remarkably complex pictorial space. Each of these objects also reflects light, colour, and form, but even with this added visual interest, each also seems stable in our field of vision in comparison with the exuberant reds, yellows, and greens of flowers Milne displays in this makeshift yet punctilious arrangement. The flowers are mirrored in the shiny surfaces Milne has brought to the table. The result is joyous ramification and a celebration of the painter’s skill that Milne was justifiably pleased with.

We thank Dr. Mark A. Cheetham, professor of art history at the University of Toronto and author of “Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the '60s” (Cambridge University Press), for contributing the preceding essay.