LANDSCAPE ART IN CANADA 



Horatio Walker has been exhibiting regularly in Canada ; more recently 

 the Royal Canadian Academy has elected him an Honorary Academi- 

 cian, and his art is properly bound up again with his native country. 

 Ernest Lawson also is a Canadian and, thanks to the Canadiam Art 

 Club, exhibits regularly in Canada, though in his case the inspiration 

 for his subtly conceived effects of snow and sunshine or misty spring 

 is drawn from the vicinity of New York, where he lives. 

 James Wilson Morrice, a member of the International Society in Lon- 

 don and a household name in Paris, is a Canadian, born at Montreal, 

 and although living mostly in Paris, paints many pictures of the Quebec 

 winter, with quaint houses and subtle effects of snow and sunshine. 

 Charles W. Jefferys (pp. 2 1 and 23), after an apprenticeship at illustra- 

 tion, was the first Canadian to paint the rolling prairie lands of the west, 

 where the red wheat waves in the summer breeze as far as the eye can 

 reach, round homesteads which lie like oases in a desert of gold, and the 

 spring flowers surpass all imagination. This is, however, not the artist's 

 only achievement, for the National Gallery acquired an exquisitely 

 truthful study of winter snows called Winter Afternoon (p. 21), and more 

 recently still a tenderly intimate water-colour of willows fluttering 

 above a brawling stream. 



These are some of the men, and there are others who, by their sincerity 

 and growing understanding of their own country, have brought forward 

 its landscape painting to the dawn of a national school from the homely 

 transcriptions of the pioneer painters. 



There is no doubt that the most significant thing about Canadian art 

 to-day is its group of younger landscape painters. They are not all of 

 them even born in Canada, and there are no particularly rigid lines en- 

 circling them, for a number of those previously mentioned may be in- 

 cluded in the group or in its ourskirts ; but from a centre which may be 

 said to be in a certain studio building in Toronto, and which has its con- 

 nexions in Montreal and else where, these apostles of thedecorative land- 

 scape have gone forth, and, as Charles Marriott puts it, have turned up 

 the 'subsoil' of Canadian nature and have found a veritable wonderland 

 which holds them enthralled. In their decorative arrangement and 

 brilliant colour one sees the hope of a distinctly national school of land- 

 scape painting, which at present seems more allied to the modern Scan- 

 dinavian than to anything the United Kingdom has produced. 

 Climate is necessarily a great factor in a country's art. Canada possesses 

 at least three incomparable seasons. Spring is so short that the radiance 

 of her budding birches and woodland flowers is hardly realized before 

 the leaf is full and summer holds sway. The Canadian summer is 

 tropical ; weeks of cloudless skies, when the lakes are ruffled into the 

 deepest blue by the morning wind, to sink again at sunset into a mirrored 

 peace broken only by the wild laugh of the loon, or the splash of a leap- 

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