Early Evening, Winter, 1928

Peter Dobush, Montreal Gift to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1965

"The Peter Dobush Donation", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 16 November-1 December 1965 "Trees of a Thousand Kind and Tall", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 10 December 1983-1 April 1984 "Founders’ Exhibition: The Peter Dobush Donation", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 26 April-7 July 1985 "Canadian Historical Art from the Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 6 April-16 July 1989 "Stored Secrets: The Vault on View", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 11 September-27 November 1994 "Canadian Mosaic: Selections from the WAG's 20th Century Canadian Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 21 August 2004-6 March 2005 "Diana Thorneycroft: Canada, Myth and History (Group of Seven Awkward Moments Series)", McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg; travelling to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 12 June-22 August 2010

Robert Burford Mason, "A Grand Eye for Glory: A Life of Franz Johnston", Toronto, 1998, pages 40, 63

Franz Johnston is a renowned lyrical painter, as his skill in rendering the quality of light and shadow on snow is unsurpassed. Johnston’s treatment of the Canadian landscape in a decorative style sets him apart among Canadian artists. In a review of his first independent exhibition in 1920, "The Globe and Mail" commended his approach, remarking, “Mr. Johnston leans strongly to the decorative treatment of his subject, and with it he infuses much poetry and imagination.” Johnston exemplifies this approach in "Early Evening, Winter", 1928. The harmonious composition of crisp white snow and the snow-covered evergreen tree set before a radiant, dramatic sky is quintessential Johnston. Following a lucrative commission in 1927 to paint nine murals for the auditorium of Pickering College in Newmarket, Johnston embarked on a painting trip to northern Quebec. On this trip Johnston studied the effects of various qualities of light on snow. This was the first of many painting trips Johnston would take in his search for the beauty of light effect. As Roger Burford Mason suggests, “perhaps the thrill of danger and the isolation were an integral and necessary part of Johnston’s heady experience of painting in the northland; numerous stories circulated in the press and among Toronto’s artistic community of his being lost in snow, or in impenetrable bush, or being snowed in with diminishing supplies. But whatever the case, he continued to study the nature of snow and light in painting trips.”