Canadian Traditions. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1985.

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CANADIAN TRADITIONS

From the Vancouver Art Gallery Collection

The Vancouver Art Gallery has extensive holdings of Canadian art in its collection. This exhibition features a selection of those holdings to represent certain aspects of the Canadian tradition.

The earliest works are portraits and landscapes by eastern Canadian painters who worked in European traditions. Paul Peel was a student of the academic Parisian artist, Jean-Leon Gérome. His highly polished surface and interest in domestic allegory are seen in his Reading the Future, 1883. Twentieth century figurative and portrait works include Frederick Varley's (1881-1969) Untitled Figure Study, 1939 and Randolph Stanley Hewton's (1888-1960) art deco portrait of Mrs Thomas Caverhill nee Robertson, 1925. Early landscapes include Cornelius Krieghoff's (1815-1872) Indian Encampment which is typical of the nineteenth century European idealization of Indian life. Krieghoff immigrated to Canada as a relatively young man in his early thirties and lived here most of his life. The influence of French Impressionism is seen in Quebec artist Marc Auréle de Foy Suzor-Coté's (1869-1937) Winter Street Scene, 1918, while Homer Watson's (1855-1936) The Load of Grass, c. 1898, harks back to the romantic tradition with its noble treatment of the pastoral landscape. Earthy colours and thick paint are used to express a rapport with rural nature.

But the strength of this gallery's Canadian collection is in the modern period. Tom Thomson's (1887-1917) Nocturne, 1915, is a brilliant oil sketch which creates a sensation of pure colour—an abstract sensation meant to correspond with a feeling for landscape. Thomson's achievement, which was cut short by his premature death in 1917 at the age of thirty, was a major inspiration for Lawren Harris (1885-1970) and the Group of Seven.

Harris believed that the imagery of the north was a national spiritual heritage and he endeavoured, in the 1920s, to render the bleak but sublime northern terrain in terms of a metaphysical geometry. By 1940, he had moved on from representational art to paint visionary abstract works which allied him to the Transcendentalists of the United States. He was an influence on, and an early supporter of, Emily Carr and spent the last 33 years of his life in Vancouver where he made an enormous contribution to the introduction of modernist ideas in this city. Eleven very fine Harris drawings, recently donated to the gallery by his daughter, Mrs James H. Knox, will be exhibited for the first time.

Works by other members of the Group, including two recently acquired paintings by A.Y. Jackson (1882-1974) are also included in the exhibition.

The gallery also owns a fine selection of the work of David Milne (1882-1953). Milne pursued nature in a very Canadian way. Like Tom Thomson before him or the painters of the Group of Seven, he spent months in isolated wilderness in search of his motif. Milne disliked the idealism of the Group and forged a unique and individual vision of nature. His delicate and sensual watercolours are among the highlights of Canadian art history.

Works of social commentary are also displayed. They include Maxwell Bates' (1906-1980) caustic canvas Beautiful B.C., 1966. Almost twenty years old, this work still has the power to offend and amuse.

The experience of the Second World War is reflected in watercolours by Jack Shadbolt, a painting by Mary Ritter Hamilton and prints by Frederick Taylor. Also included are post-war works which demonstrate the strength of an expressionist tradition based on nature in Canadian painting. Works by Alistair Bell (b. 1913) and Jack Shabolt (b. 1909) depict nature not as ideal form but as growing and decaying substance and as a metaphor of the human condition in the modern world.


Scott Watson