Ash Prakash & Associates, Inc., Toronto
Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal as “Autumn Tangle, Laurentians”, circa 1948
Private Collection, Toronto
Exhibited
“Edwin Holgate”, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; travelling to the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; The McMichael Canadian
Art Collection, Kleinburg; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Frederiction, 26 May 2005‒15 April 2007, no. 119
“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 as “Autumn Tangle”, circa 1940
Literature
Dennis Reid, “Edwin H. Holgate”, Ottawa, 1976, page 22
Brian Foss, Rosalind Pepall and Laura Brandon, “Edwin Holgate”, 2005, no. 119, reproduced page 161
Ian Thom, et al., “Embracing Canada: Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven”, Vancouver/London, 2015, reproduced page 139
A landscape painter, portraitist, muralist, printmaker and illustrator, Edwin Holgate most often found his subjects in the province of Quebec. The artist loved the outdoors and had always been interested in depicting the wilderness of the Laurentians. He built a cabin at Lake Tremblant in 1925, but later sold the property to purchase a nine-acre piece of land in Morin Heights, where he settled with his wife Frances in 1946.
Holgate painted “Autumn Tangle, Laurentians” two years later, depicting his preferred subject of periods of rapid change of the Canadian landscape between seasons. Dennis Reid remarks on Holgate's artistic output following his move, which accurately describes the colourful and dense composition: “His small oil sketches of the late forties and fifties in particular are sure and deft, spontaneous in response, yet resolved, tight works of art. Usually close-in, intimate studies of forest interiors, they are rich in observed detail and exciting colour.” Reid describes the artist's Laurentian works as “among the most sensual of his works, they reveal across every inch of their surfaces the long hours of concentration that have brought to them the gentle glow of life.”
