John Young Johnstone 1887 - 1930

Private Collection, Quebec

A.K. Prakash, John Young Johnstone Retrospective Exhibition, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, 2005, p. 4

This painting is clean, with saturated colours and is in overall very good condition. Under UV, touch ups in spots along the top edge, left edge and intermittently across the whole of the canvas in a line about two inches from the top, fluoresce. There also appears to have been some restoration to an area in the lower left corner. There is some minor loss in the bottom left corner, and in the trunk at the top of one of the trees.
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Despite being a member of the Beaver Hall Group, exhibiting with the Royal Canadian Academy, and having four major canvases similar to this one in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, John Young Johnstone remains a relatively unknown artist. Like his peers Morrice and Cullen, Johnstone studied in Europe and adopted the style of the Impressionists and their followers. Although this is evident in his oeuvre, Johnstone's paintings elicit a stillness and melancholy that is uniquely his own. In a catalogue written for a Johnstone retrospective at Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, the only such exhibition to date, A.K. Prakash observes that he was

a man who displayed respect for tradition yet was one of the first of the Moderns among all the Canadian painters at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Painted in 1925, In the Maple Grove is a resolved splendid canvas that reflects the artistic maturity that Johnstone achieved in many of his later works. His palette is sophisticated and assured, and the brushwork is wonderfully expressive. A warm light diffuses the whole canvas, and the details of the figures and the distant houses are wrought with great care. The balance of shadow and sunshine, deployed with astonishing originality, invigorates the scene with unusual forms and layered colours.

Johnstone's small, exquisite oil sketches are rare while his larger canvases are rarer still. If a few more paintings of this calibre came to notice, Johnstone's reputation would be permanently established.