Mt. Hungabee, from Odaray Bench, 1929 by James Edward Hervey MacDonald
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J.E.H. MacDonald
Mt. Hungabee, from Odaray Bench, 1929
oil on board
signed and dated 1929 lower right; signed, titled and dated "Sept. 1929?" on the reverse
8.5 x 10.5 in ( 21.6 x 26.7 cm )
Auction Estimate: $70,000.00 - $90,000.00
Laing Galleries, Toronto
Private Collection, Ontario
Paul Duval, 'J.E.H. MacDonald Biography' in D.G. Carmichael, "The McMichael Canadian Collection", Kleinburg, 1979, page 51
One such favourite spot, the Odaray Bench—just southwest of Schäffer Lake on the McArthur Pass Trail—offered sweeping views to the north. MacDonald painted this scene using expressive brushwork and a refined colour palette, making this a particularly rich and textured rendering. The painting captures a majestic mountain range, rendered with dramatic peaks, rolling contours, and a glowing glacier nestled between the slopes. The composition rises sharply toward the sky, creating a sense of elevation and grandeur. MacDonald uses broad, expressive brushstrokes and a cool-toned palette dominated by blues, lavenders, soft creams, and ochres. The ridges and valleys are built up with rhythmic, almost sculptural bands of color, giving the forms a carved, monumental quality. The glacier at centre adds a bright, luminous contrast, catching the light and guiding the eye inward.
MacDonald’s artistic vision was grounded in a transcendental approach. For him, the subject itself mattered less than the emotional or spiritual response it evoked. In this work, he strove to convey his personal, poetic encounter with the grandeur of the landscape—the emotional resonance and the sense of the sublime it stirred in him. His process both challenged and supported this aim: painting oil sketches outdoors ("en plein air"), he had to respond quickly to shifting light and weather conditions. This urgency often brought a sense of immediacy to his work, and at times, sparked moments of poetic clarity.
MacDonald believed that the landscape was more than just scenery—it was a source of profound emotional and even metaphysical experience. His brushwork is expressive, and his palette bold, capturing the energy and vitality of nature, especially the forests, rivers, and mountain ranges of Canada. Author Paul Duval commented that "no Canadian landscape painter possessed a richer command of colour and pigment than J.E.H. MacDonald... His brushwork is at once disciplined and vigorous. His best on-the-spot sketches possess an intensity and freshness of execution not dissimilar from Van Gogh."
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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.
