Souvenir Catalogue: Opening the New Vancouver Art Gallery, 1951. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1951.

[transcription]



SOUTH GALLERY

CANADIAN PICTURES FROM OUR PERMANENT COLLECTION

Soon after its foundation, the Vancouver Art Gallery was presented by the Founders with three Canadian paintings, by James W. Morrice, A. Y. Jackson, and H. Mabel May respectively. These three pictures are hanging in this exhibition and, as one may see, constituted an auspicious beginning for the building of a Canadian collection.

The Morrice, "On the Beach, Dinard", is a small but fine example of this most sensitive and lyrical of Canadian painters who died in 1924. The A. Y. Jackson, "Road to St. Fidele" is typical of the full rhythmic style which distinguishes his position in the Group of Seven, the first concerted movement in Canadian painting history. A dramatic Arthur Lismer, "Pine Trees, Georgian Bay", a soberly splendid J. E. H. MacDonald, "Church by the Sea", a discerning and painterly portrait of H. Mortimer Lamb by F. H. Varley (all three the gift of Mr. Lamb), and a brilliant later Jackson, further represent work by the original 'Seven'. Lawren Harris, also a member of the Group, is represented in this selection by a very recent work.

The influence of the Group was evidenced in the broad landscape style which dominated Canadian painting for some years, a good example of which is here shown in Mabel May's "Autumn in the Laurentians". (This spring the Gallery will hold an exhibition of the work of Miss May who now lives in Vancouver). The tradition of landscape, of course, has continued right up to the present in varying personal interpretations: David Milne, best known for his delicate imaginative watercolors, here shows a brilliantly executed oil; Edward Hughes, a Victoria painter, hangs a landscape of arresting intentness; James MacDonald, a young Vancouver painter, brings the landscape to the city in a richly painted canvas.

Since the time of the Group of Seven, new elements, new trends, already manifest elsewhere, have been finding their expression in our painting. Some of them are reflected in this exhibition. There is the showy realism of W. A. Winter's "Midnight at Charlie's"; the melancholy of Jack Nichols' turpentine wash painting of children, the loneliness of Don Jarvis' "Old Man"; the element of expressionism present in Fritz Brandtner's semi-abstract landscape. There is too, the concern with form, to a greater or lesser degree stripped of its representational references: as in Molly Bobak, for its sensuous life; as in B.C. Binning for its own structural life; as in the Lawren Harris as a means to a metaphysical meaning.

This selection of painting well demonstrates that this Gallery may be proud of its Canadian collection, and Canada of her painters.

DORIS SHADBOLT
Vancouver Art Gallery Docent