Ragged Lake, Algonquin Park, 1914, circa 1914

The Artist J.J. Vaughan, Toronto By descent to Ruth Bond, daughter Private Collection Acquired by the present Private Collection, March 1993

Possibly “Department of Fine Arts”, Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, 29 August 1914, no. 292 as “On a Northern Lake” $450 Possibly “Paintings and Sketches by Arthur Lismer, O.S.A.,” Victoria School of Art and Design, Halifax, 25‒30 July 1919, no. 7 as “Northern Ontario” “Hommage à Arthur Lismer,” Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, Montreal, September 1997, no. 4 “Canadian Masterpieces”, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, September 2008, no. 11 “Embracing Canada: Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven”, Vancouver Art Gallery; travelling to the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; Art Gallery of Hamilton, 30 October 2015‒25 September 2016 Highlights from Embracing Canada, Galerie Eric Klinkhoff, Montreal, 22 October‒5 November 2016, no. 14

Arthur Lismer, “Algonquin Park First Impressions”, May 1914, manuscript, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Gift of Marjorie Lismer Bridges, 1981 J.B. McLeish, “September Gale”, Toronto, 1955, pages 29‒32, 48‒49 Ottelyn Addison, “Tom Thomson: the Algonquin Years”, Toronto, 1969, page 28 Dennis Reid, “Le Groupe des Sept/The Group of Seven”, Ottawa, 1970, page 74 Joan Murray, “Tom Thomson: Design for a Canadian Hero”, Toronto/ Oxford, 1998, pages 55‒57 Charles C. Hill, ‘Tom Thomson, Painter’, in Dennis Reid, et al, “Tom Thomson”, Toronto/Ottawa/Vancouver, 2002, pages 124‒125, 312‒313 Ian Thom, et al., “Embracing Canada: Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven”, Vancouver/London, 2015, reproduced page 95, caption page 201

A bare trunk rises to a cloudy sky, a stump anchors the foreground lower left, light and shadow pattern the wooded hill on the far shore. This remarkable canvas, the product of a canoe trip with Tom Thomson in Algonquin Park in May 1914, marks a turning point in the career of Arthur Lismer, future member of the Group of Seven. Arthur Lismer’s first Canadian canvases were painted from sketches made in the outskirts of Toronto, in farmland and in areas being cleared for new housing developments. In September 1913 he, and his wife Esther and young daughter Marjorie, stayed at Dr. James MacCallum’s cottage at Go Home Bay on Georgian Bay. The resultant canvases were filled with a new luminosity as seen in his canvas, “Georgian Bay” of 1913 (National Gallery of Canada). The taut, dry paint surface, stiff brushwork and play of light effectively evoke the counter‒ movements of water and sky and cool light of September on the Bay. The following May Arthur Lismer and Tom Thomson canoed and painted in Algonquin Park for approximately two weeks. This was Lismer’s first experience canoeing in the wild. “Our canoe was a 16 footer Chestnut, canvas covered, roomy & capable of carrying the weight we had to put in it, stores for two weeks, tent, blankets, a cooking oven and utensils, plates and pannekins of aluminum, fishing tackle, axe, & sketching impedimenta, this last consisting (for me) of two dozen 12 1⁄2 x 9 1⁄2 three ply veneer boards of birch wood back and front & soft pine inside, & good for sketching. These fit into a holder designed to carry six & two more into a flat sketch box, also about 12 to 15 pounds of paint, oil, brushes per man. When our canoe was fully laden, we had about 2 1⁄2 inches of free board above the water line & with our two selves about 560 lbs. in all.” The two artists canoed from Canoe Lake to Smoke, Ragged, Wolf and Crown lakes, in the south‒west corner of the park. Harry Callighen, park ranger at Smoke Lake, followed the two artists movements in his diary and photographed them, with Lismer in a very jaunty English hat. Irene Wrenshall had discussed the problem artists had retaining the immediacy of the sketch in the studio canvas (see lot 108). In this instance Lismer not only retained but enhanced the initial experience. The canvas follows the sketch (lot 108) in composition and general tonality, though the proportions are more vertical, an effect enhanced by the lighting of the tall bare trunk that brings it forward towards the viewer. In the canvas, all elements are more structured, the pattern of the light on the sunlit hilltop more defined and the brushwork more emphatic. The distant hill is painted in greens and blues with only a dark shoreline, unlike the brown slopes in the sketch. The arrangement of the detritus in the foreground is more controlled. The shoots by the stump, not seen in the sketch, painted in light greens and whites, link the foreground to the hills beyond. The sky is less stormy and sunnier and the whole effect is more luminous though still retaining the cold light of the spring landscape, so very different from the autumnal tints of “The Guide’s Home, Algonquin” (National Gallery of Canada, ac. no. 1155) worked up from a sketch painted in Algonquin Park in October 1914. We extend our thanks to Charles Hill, Canadian art historian, former Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada and author of “The Group of Seven‒Art for a Nation”, for his assistance in researching this artwork and for contributing the preceding essa