Lake and Hills

G. Blair Laing Galleries, Toronto Private Collection, St. Catharines Sotheby’s Canada, auction, Toronto, 26 May 2011, lot 3 Private Collection, Calgary

Megan Bice, “Light & Shadow: The Work of Franklin Carmichael”, Kleinburg, 1990, page 38

During the mid-to-late 1920s, Franklin Carmichael embarked on sketching trips throughout Ontario; on some occasions he travelled alone and in other instances he was accompanied by fellow Group of Seven members. While his associates painted oil sketches, Carmichael preferred to depict his subjects en plein-air in watercolour. The artist strongly believed in the independent validity to the medium, and asked high prices for his watercolours in order to reflect their status, which he believed to be equal to oil painting. Carmichael co-founded the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1925, in an effort to give the medium the importance and recognition it deserved. The artist proclaimed: “As a medium, it is capable of responding to the slightest variation of effect or mood. It can be at once clean cut, sharp, delicate and forceful or subtle, brilliant or sombre, including all of the variations that lie in between.” “Lake and Hills” exemplifies Carmichael’s description, as it contains a mixture of sharp lines in the mountains and cloud formations, as well as subtle, looser strokes in the lake and rocky foreground. Lake and Hills is exemplary of Carmichael’s expansive vistas, with multiple levels that draw the viewer’s eye from the immediate foreground into the distance. As the member who painted most frequently in the medium, Ian Thom declares, “It is in his watercolours that Carmichael made his greatest contribution to the Group and to Canadian painting in general.”