David Brown Milne 1882 - 1953

These two impressions of Milne's Blind Road and Queen's Hotel were purchased by the consignor of this lot in the late 1930s, and have been in a portfolio in a drawer until now. They are in mint condition and represent Milne's drypoints at their best. Both subjects were printed at Palgrave, Ontario, where Milne found the subjects close to his house in that small rural village, northwest of Toronto.

Blind Road (1930) was what the locals called concession roads that were not pushed through to connect with other concession roads, or which dead-ended in either a pond, a quarry, or other natural obstructions. Milne tried many variations of colour with this work (the National Gallery has ten all quite different copies), switching the green, blue and the reddish-orange about, trying a pale green background, a more brilliant red, a japanese tissue paper (which was fine for one or two other subjects, such as Waterfall), and other combinations that he rejected until he found most satisfaction in the print offered here. 'After making 35 or 40 prints working on the plates each time it lead to nothing so I abandoned the plates until I had pretty well finished the other three subjects' [he was working on].

Queen's Hotel (probably made in the summer of 1931, when the painting from which it was taken, Queen's Hotel on a Dark Day [Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon] was made), was just behind Milne's house in Palgrave, and was often painted and from nearly all directions. Like Blind Road, this drypoint is also marked as out of 25 (and other copies as out of 50), but the truth is that only about a dozen copies exist in addition to seven trial proofs.