Manitoba Landscape, 1929

Estate of Douglas M. Duncan (label signed by Frances Barwick & Cecil Troy on the reverse) Private Collection, Edmonton

The year 1929 was an eventful one for Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald both professionally and personally. His flourishing art career was recognized by the National Gallery of Canada when they purchased his Williamson’s Garage from their Annual Exhibition of Canadian Art. His teaching excellence was rewarded when he was promoted to the principalship of the Winnipeg School of Art. And on a personal level, meeting Bertram Brooker, Toronto artist, writer, and former Winnipegger, was consequential. That summer the two painters talked voluminously and sketched together. Their ensuing friendship lasted for the rest of their lives, and Brooker became a major advocate for FitzGerald’s art. From 1928 to 1930 Brooker commanded a large readership who avidly followed his weekly column “The Seven Arts” syndicated in five Southam newspapers across Canada. He first championed FitzGerald’s work in the 7 September 1929 issue of the Ottawa Evening Citizen: “It is not easy to capture the mood of the West. The landscape, of course, becomes a horizontal strip across the canvas, and the rest is sky; and cloud formations do not vary a great deal anywhere. The Western artists whose work I have seen do not appear to concern themselves greatly with the task of portraying the essential moods of their country. LeMoine FitzGerald is constantly searching for the structure, spatial relationships and colour subtleties of the subjects he approaches.” While the small Manitoba Landscape, 1929 conforms to the formulaic low horizon and big sky characteristic of many prairie pictures, here FitzGerald transcends this compositional cliché to paint a compelling vision of the majesty of a prairie sky. Unlike his more characteristic large, smoothly finished landscape canvases from the period, FitzGerald’s Manitoba Landscape, executed in oil on wood, is smaller and more textured. The panel’s surface, built from layered brushstrokes of opaque paint, imparts an immediacy consistent with a sketch made rapidly outdoors. The shapes of the clouds and the strong foreground horizontal band have an abstract quality. These elements combine to make Manitoba Landscape one of the most dynamic, dramatic, and powerful small paintings found in FitzGerald’s entire oeuvre. Michael Parke-Taylor is a Canadian art historian, curator, and author of "Bertram Brooker: When We Awake!" (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2024) and editor of "Some Magnetic Force: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Writings" (Concordia University Press, 2023).