Provenance
Ritchies, auction, Toronto, 23 September 2003, lot 145
Private Collection, Ontario
Literature
William G. Colgate, “Arthur Heming, Recorder of the North”, Fine Art Gallery, Eaton’s, 1933, unpaginated
Arthur Heming painted in a monochrome palette for most of his life, employing black, white, and yellow tones. The artist possibly chose this style at least nominally because of an early diagnosis of color blindness. This monochrome scheme lasted until the age of sixty, when a full, nearly technicolor palette suddenly splashed across his canvases. Heming painted from experience, having spent many years involved in lumbering, mining, railroading, big game hunting and the rugged lifestyle of living on the land. Heming embarked on expeditions into the wilderness to capture romantic scenes of adventure for illustrations in books and publications. Life in the backcountry captured his interest, not in terms of the sentimentality of the picturesque countryside or forest, but in the power of nature. Ablaze with colour, this painting by Heming is a monumental panorama, uniting various animals of the Canadian landscape in one harmonious scene set against the staggering backdrop of the mountains. As William Colgate, an early writer on Heming remarks, “In a field which [Heming] has made peculiarly his own, we follow his lead to the home haunts of our wild neighbours: the deer, the moose, the caribou, the bear, the lynx, the beaver, the fox, where they severally enact their parts in the grim drama of the forest, where Darwin’s great law of life is inexorably fulfilled.”
Prior to his death in 1940, Heming had pursued having his work in the collection of the Hudson Bay Company as a contributor to the history of Canadian wilderness exploration, as he did not see art museums as the preferred place for his paintings. A selection of his fur trade paintings were instead purchased by the Royal Ontario Museum in 1921, however, the recognition for his work came from the natural history branch rather than the fine arts branch. A collection of paintings entered the Royal Ontario Museum of Zoology and in 1962 transitioned to the Canadiana collection of the museum.
