James Edward Hervey MacDonald 1873 - 1932

Private Collection, Toronto

Bruce Whiteman, J.E.H Macdonald, Kingston, 1995, p. 87

This panel is in excellent condition with no apparent issues under UV.
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MacDonald was able to find a dramatic narrative in just about every scene he contemplated as a painter. Whether the treatment he settled upon was explosive and highly keyed or quietly subdued and subtle seemed to depend upon the subject and the details of what he saw. Sometimes he combined both, as he has here.

The subject, in this instance, is the view from the back of MacDonald's house (which still stands today), in the then little town of Thornhill, just north of Toronto. This bucolic setting of farm and field, with the blooming lilac bushes to the left and the barns and livestock to the right, seems to be endangered by an ominous sky.

MacDonald's skies are always prodigious, but this one is unusually so. The bright white at the horizon gives a sharp silhouette to the skyline on the right side. Above it, with a rip or two of white again, is a scumbled, dark, blue-gray cloud. Flashing across the whole composition like a bolt of lightning is a fissure of blue, lilac-pink, and lighter gray. The amorphous area at the top of the sketch at the right repeats the gray in a paler tone, as does the white and pink near the tree, giving a sharper and an eerie outline to the form of the great elm tree, which dominates the central space of the painting.

MacDonald was not only a superb painter and a fine poet, he was also a great commercial designer – someone who knew the profound secrets of composition, the elements that pull or tickle or deceive the eye. These principles of good design were not mechanical: they were poetic, and they were part of what made MacDonald's work as a painter so compelling.

Bruce Whiteman wrote that "In MacDonald's finest work, his design training is in perfect harmony with an open and instinctive sensibility that is lyrical or austere in appropriate proportion to the piece of the world by which it is temporarily captured." That is surely fully evident in this exceptional sketch.