Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by Theodosia Dawes Bond Thornton, January 13, 1949 for $37.50;
Estate of Theodosia Dawes Bond Thornton, Montreal;
Sale of Heffel Fine Art, November 25, 2010, lot #166;
Private collection
Literature
Lois Darroch, Bright Land, A Warm Look at Arthur Lismer, 1981, p.104;
Theodosia Dawes Bond Thornton, Personal Art Collection Catalogue, reproduced, unpaginated, cat. R19
Georgian Bay was a central location in the life of Arthur Lismer. It was there, he felt, that he truly found himself as a painter. It was his Lake O’Hara, his Lake Superior, his rural Quebec. Each member of the Group of Seven found a region of Canada where the scenery resonated exactly with the intent of their art, and for Lismer, it was Georgian Bay. Pines and Sumac, Georgian Bay is a fine example of this, where the wild forest, with its particular tangle of vegetation, the windswept shapes of the trees, the exposed rock and variety of colour are captured in vibrant, almost frenzied brushwork. We can feel the forest blowing when we look at this work.
The estate of Theodosia Dawes Bond Thornton (1915 – 2009) contained some of the most important works in Canadian art. The daughter of a Vice-President and General Manager for the
Canadian National Railway’s central region, she was able to travel to many of the locations depicted by the Group of Seven as a child. On a school trip to the National Gallery of Canada at the age of 16, she encountered Group works, and having a profound reaction, was flooded with memories of the trips with her father. “That was the art I saw” she would later recall, and her destiny as a collector was
sealed. She collected the very finest examples of Canadian art, of which this is one.
Arthur Lismer, painter, educator (b at Sheffield, Eng 27 June 1885; d at Montréal 23 Mar 1969). Lismer studied at Sheffield School of Art 1899-1906 and the Académie royale des beaux-arts, Antwerp, 1906-07. He moved to Canada in 1911, seeking work as a commercial illustrator. At the Grip Engraving Co…
Arthur Lismer, painter, educator (b at Sheffield, Eng 27 June 1885; d at Montréal 23 Mar 1969). Lismer studied at Sheffield School of Art 1899-1906 and the Académie royale des beaux-arts, Antwerp, 1906-07. He moved to Canada in 1911, seeking work as a commercial illustrator. At the Grip Engraving Co in Toronto, he met J.E.H. MacDonald, Tom Thomson and F.H. Johnston, and, shortly thereafter, Frank Carmichael. In 1912 he returned to England to marry and spoke so highly of Canada that F.H. VARLEY followed him to Toronto.
Lismer began his distinguished career as an art educator as principal of the Victoria School of Art and Design (later Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) in Halifax 1916-19. A prodigious worker, he painted views of Halifax harbour and returning troopships for Canadian War Records in 1918-19. He returned to Toronto to become vice-president of the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1919 and in 1920 became a founding member of the Group of Seven.
Lismer’s first Canadian paintings were heavily influenced by John Constable, but during the 1920s he developed a powerful expressionist style of his own, characterized by raw colour, heavy impasto, deliberately coarse brushwork and simplified form. But Lismer devoted most of his time to art education. From 1927 to 1938 he was the educational supervisor at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now Art Gallery of Ontario). In 1932 he undertook a nationwide lecture tour; invitations to conferences in Europe and South Africa followed, and he returned to teach in South Africa in 1936-37.
In 1938 he was visiting professor at Teachers’ College, Columbia University. He ran the Montreal Children’s Art Centre, affiliated with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 1941 to 1967. This activity left Lismer with little time to paint, but he produced many of his most original works after 1930, painting first in the Maritimes and Georgian Bay, and from 1951 at Long Beach, on Vancouver Island, each summer. The lurid, intestinal and claustrophobic qualities of many of these paintings were not to contemporary taste, but have gained acceptance in recent years, for they seem to have developed from a form of deep, personal expressionism.
