- 36
David Brown Milne 1882 - 1953
Description
- David Brown Milne
- Trillums and Trilliums
1936
signed and dated upper right David Milne 1936; titled on the reverse and on the stretcher and dated on a label on the frame
- oil on canvas
- 45.7 by 56.5 cm.
- 18 by 22 ¼ in
Provenance
Mellors Galleries, Toronto
P.M. Fowlie, Toronto, 1938
Picture Loan Society, 1941
Collection of E.R. Hunter, West Palm Beach, Florida
Exhibited
Mellors Galleries, Toronto, 1936, no. 4
Art Association of Montreal, Montreal, 1939, no. 235
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1955, no. 43
Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1979, no. 20
Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, 1984
Literature
Catalogue Note
Milne's sojourn at Six Mile Lake, where he built a tiny shack and was the lake's sole resident, was immensely productive once he had settled in, and this painting is one of the finest of the works he created during that time. When, in 1934, he sold about three hundred of his paintings to Alice and Vincent Massey for five dollars each, he was visited by Donald Buchanan, a young curator at the National Gallery in Ottawa, whom Massey had asked to write a brief introduction for an exhibition catalogue of Milne's work that had been arranged at the Mellors Gallery, the precursor of Laing Galleries. Milne wrote to Buchanan about another painting, for which this paintings was a forerunner:
...you have to keep firmly in mind my use of black and white values and hues – the values are the powerful weapons, used in large areas, the hues the weaker but more subtle tools, almost invariably sparingly used. This wasn't any choice of mine but a slow development spread over fifteen years or more.
In that picture, however, Milne reversed his usual method:
Instead of using large areas of black and white values, largely for their effect on small areas of hues, I am using a large dominating area of a bright hue, chiefly for its effect on a small patch worked in black and white values.
I first noticed this in the spring in a picture [Trilliums and Trilliums]...that wasn't approached from the dominating hue standpoint anyway, but it did fix my attention on the effect a large area with hues has on a small area where only black and white values are used. Various reds, purples & greens, are used in trilliums near at hand (large) and only black and white and middle value are used in a lamp, jar and bunch of trilliums farther away (small).
The exciting drama that Milne thus creates emerges with force and brilliance into one of his most wonderful flower pictures.