Lake O’Hara by James Edward Hervey MacDonald
J.E.H. MacDonald
Lake O’Hara
oil on board
signed and dated 1925 lower left
8.5 x 10.5 in ( 21.6 x 26.7 cm )
Auction Estimate: $70,000.00 - $90,000.00
Price Realized $216,000.00
Sale date: May 30th 2024
Possibly George Overton, Winnipeg
Arnold Brigden, Winnipeg, circa 1945
Estate of Arnold O. Brigden
Collection of The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1973
"The Brigden Collection, A Winnipeg Centennial Exhibition", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 29 May-13 October 1974, no.40
"Development of Canadian Art", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 26 March 1977-2 April 1978
"The Development of Canadian Art", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 10 June 1978- 28 January 1979
"The Development of Canadian Art", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 10 March 1979-13 July 1980
"Some Canadian Landscape Painters from the Winnipeg Art Gallery Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 10 October 1981-28 February 1982 Little Pictures, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 19 February-17 April 1983
"Stored Secrets: The Vault on View", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 11 September-27 November 1994
"The View from Here", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 20 May-31 December 2000
"Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven", Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; travelling to the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; The Groninger Museum, Groningen, the Netherlands; McMichael Canadian Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, 19 October 2011-6 January 2013
"The Collection on View: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 27 June 2015-2 April 2018
"Salon Style: 20th Century Painting", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 12 October 2018-18 May 2020
'J.E.H. MacDonald, A Glimpse of the West', "Canadian Bookman", VI:11, (November 1924), pages 229-231
Patricia E. Bovey, 'Introduction', "The Brigden Collection", Winnipeg, 1974
Mary Jo Hughes, "The View from Here: Selections from the Canadian Historical Collection", Winnipeg, 2000, reproduced page 64
Gerald Friesen, 'Can You Trust It? The View From Here and the WAG Canadian Collection as Historical Documents', "Manitoba History" (Spring/Summer 2001), no.41, reproduced page 35
Lisa Christensen, "The Lake O’Hara Art of J.E.H. MacDonald and Hiker’s Guide", Calgary, 2003, pages 15, 20-23, 38-59
Jane Lytton Gooch, 'Artists of the Rockies: Inspiration of Lake O’Hara', "The Alpine Club of Canada, The Rockies Network", Fernie, B.C., 2003, reproduced page 111
Stephen Borys, "Winnipeg Art Gallery: Guide to the Collections", Winnipeg, 2010, reproduced page 77
Ian A. C. Dejardin 'Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven' in Amy Concannon, "Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven", London, 2011, page 24, reproduced page 164
Olivier Côté, 'Construire la nation au petit écran: Le Canada, une histoire populaire de CBC/Radio-Canada 1995-2002', "Septentrion", Quebec, 2014, reproduced page 209
MacDonald returned to Lake O’Hara in August 1925 when he painted this sketch, possibly the one he described in his diary on 30 August, “Sketched Lefroy and Peaks in afternoon with O’Hara and rocky foreground.” This is a much more animated and less pastoral view than the drawing of 1924 and must have been painted from higher up, not from the shores of the lake. The water is even a smaller sliver of blue and the trees on the lower slopes are reduced to undefined brushstrokes of darker green. MacDonald has focused on the colourful, fallen rocks that superbly animate the foreground, playing against the more muted tones of the mountain peaks above and beyond.
This oil sketch was donated to the Winnipeg Art Gallery from the estate of Arnold Brigden (1886-1972). Born in London, England he came to Toronto in 1914 to join his uncle Frederick Brigden Sr., head of the photo-engraving and printing firm Brigdens Limited, and in 1919 moved to Winnipeg. Opened in 1914 Brigdens of Winnipeg was established to produce the western Canadian catalogue of the T. Eaton Co. and the firm became a centre of art activity in the city. Over the years, employees included, among others, Eric Bergman, Charles Comfort, Fritz Brandtner, Caven Atkins, William Winter, Philip Surrey and Gordon Smith. Arnold was an avid student of Alpine botany and in 1918 joined the Alpine Club spending many summers hiking around Banff. It was undoubtedly his love of the mountains that attracted him to this superb sketch by J.E.H. MacDonald.
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 essay.
This artwork is being sold to benefit the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG)-Qaumajuq in establishing an endowment fund to support more diverse representation in the permanent collection, beginning with contemporary Canadian art. Cowley Abbott is pleased to donate our selling commission to the fund as part of the sale.
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James Edward Hervey MacDonald
(1873 - 1932) Group of Seven, OSA, RCA
James Edward Hervey MacDonald, painter was born in Durham, England on 12 May 1873. Among the Group of Seven, of which he was a founder, J.E.H. MacDonald was one of the best trained, first at the Hamilton Art School from about 1887 and, after 1889, in Toronto lithography houses and at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design, where he studied with William Cruikshank. In 1895 he joined Grip Ltd, an important commercial art firm, where he encouraged the staff (which included Tom Thomson from about 1907) to develop as painters. MacDonald was a key member of the later Group. Lawren Harris recalled that a show of MacDonald's in 1912 at the Ontario Society of Artists gave him his first recognition of the Group's "ethos."
MacDonald was Harris's greatest early friend among the Toronto painting community. Together in 1913 they went to the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, to see the survey of Scandinavian landscape painting which was to influence their work. Around this time MacDonald introduced more colour into his dark panels. Algoma, north of Lake Superior, which he visited several times with Harris's help from 1919, became the country of his heart. His best paintings were done there, often of great vistas in a turbulent, patterned style. The sketch Mist Fantasy, Sand River, Algoma (1920, National Gallery of Canada) shows how he used the sketches he made in Algoma: the finished canvas (1922, now in the Art Gallery of Ontario), with its long ribbons of mist, was noted by a later critic as the height of MacDonald's way of stylizing form. In 1924 he made the first of 7 trips to the Rockies, another favourite painting place.
MacDonald's palette was dark, tough and rich, like A.Y. Jackson's, but his colouring was more fiery and his style more elegant. His sense of composition was oriented towards his meditation on design, a subject in which he was a master (he was the greatest calligrapher of the period and a designer of consequence). Like other members of the Group, he loved Chinese and Japanese art.
Among other tasks he performed was the decoration of St Anne's Church, Toronto (1923), and teaching at the Ontario College of Art. He also wrote poetry after a nervous breakdown in 1917. He was an eccentric gardener and enjoyed playing on a set of chimes made of old plough points. One of his favourite authors was Henry David Thoreau, for whom he named his son, illustrator Thoreau MacDonald. The artist died in Toronto on 26 November 1932.
