James Edward Hervey MacDonald 1873 - 1932

Loch Gallery, Winnipeg
Private Collection

MacDonald had impeccable intuition, nurtured by years of steady work as a painter and illustrator, for strength and structure in composition and design. Nothing shows this better than his small oil sketch of Cathedral Mountain in the Rockies.

From the moment he first travelled west to the mountains in 1925 with Harris and Jackson, MacDonald was in thrall to the grandeur and the rugged magnificence of the area around Banff, Jasper, and Lake Louise. He loved the lakes: Emerald, Maligne, McArthur, and others; and he stood in awe of individual mountains such as this Cathedral Mountain. He kept going back to this fountain of inspiration every summer until the year before he died.

Within the boundaries of this small panel, MacDonald has managed to convey a complete and convincing sense of the scale, distance, and character of this enormous vista. He has used a foreground to kick things off, two trees to divide the scene into three parts, puffy white clouds for contrast to the massive, darker, pile of rock. Every element is situated precisely where it should be, and one can easily believe that little has changed in the eight decades since it was painted.