Arthur Lismer 1885 - 1969

Morris Gallery, Toronto

Private Collection, Toronto

Possibly exhibited in Toronto, Group of Seven Exhibition, Art Gallery of Toronto, December, 1922, one of three Bon Echo canvases

This work has been viewed under UV and it is in excellent condition. The canvas is laid down and the edges have been cropped and there are small touch ups in the water and shore line and also in the rock on the right side of the canvas. We would like to thank "In Restauro Conservart Inc." for examing this painting and their original notes are available upon request to Sotheby's.
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The site of this magnificent Mazinaw Rock is Bon Echo, a Provincial Park since 1965, situated about midway between Ottawa and Toronto, about eighty kilometres north of Belleville, just north of Kaladar. The First Nations people held this site to be a sacred place and they adorned the rock at water level with numerous pictographs.

When Lismer painted there in the early 1920s, the Bon Echo Inn was run by Flora and Harold Denison. These outstanding patrons of the arts had purchased the property from Dr. Weston Price of Toronto, who had peopled it with teetotalling Methodist ministers. The Denisons pushed out the Methodists, and instead turned the Inn into a mecca (although doubtless not 'dry') for painters, poets, novelists, playwrights, actors and musicians. Throughout the 1920's, Bon Echo was a major centre for the arts in the summertime and nearly all the members of the Group of Seven spent time there. Although they were there chiefly to paint, they designed stage sets and costumes for theatrical performances, as they often did for the Arts and Letters Club or the theatre at Hart House in Toronto, and also pitched in to do posters, advertisements and other ephemera for the Inn.

Lismer's painting of this towering sheer granite bluff, which is over one hundred metres high, and plunges straight into Ontario's second deepest lake, was done as a result of his sojourns there in 1921 and 1922. The canvas is a tour de force, and quite probably was one of three Bon Echo subjects that he showed in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto in December of 1922.

The painting itself sets the great rock face into a rather original context compared to most artistic renditions of it which tend to confront it head on at lake level. Lismer has positioned himself and the viewer high up near the summit, looking down the vertiginous pitch to the lake. He has concentrated on the surroundings more, in order to provide a variety of colours and shapes: the branches of the nearby pine tree, the white birch with its yellow leaves, and the small splashes of red maple leaves, all actually enhance, rather than distract, from the dramatic setting of the rock.

In every detail the painting shows how much Lismer had developed and grown since his arrival in Canada only a few years earlier. The English watercolour tradition has been abandoned, and the expressionist influences of his travels in Europe during his student years have come boldly to the fore. The canvas is done with raw, strong pigments in bright colours and sharp contrasts, a wide brush, and an energy and verve that Lismer had in abundance at this time in his life. It would be safe to say that he was, at this time, at the peak of his powers as a painter and this painting is certainly one of his masterpieces.