David Brown Milne 1882 - 1953

Vincent Massey, Port Hope, acquired directly from the artist (1934)
Laing Galleries, Toronto (1958)
Mr. and Mrs. Walter Landauer, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Hart House, University of Toronto, 1962, as Red Pool in Temagami

David Milne Jr. and David P. Silcox, David B. Milne, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume 2: 1929-1953, 208.14, p. 461, reproduced.

When Milne returned to Canada after residing in the United States for twenty-six years, he decided to make his way to Cobalt, since he had heard, probably through Harry McCurry at the National Gallery, that other artists had found that now-abandoned town a good and quiet place to paint. On the way, he stopped off in Temagami and decided to settle there for the summer and to try to get back a regular painting life. The years in the Adirondacks had been filled with distractions: building a substantial cottage, alone, running a tea house at Big Moose Lake, and working in the winters at the Lake Placid ski jump. Painting seriously needed full-time concentration and time for thought.

Soon after setting up his camp on an island a short distance down the lake from the town, Milne found the abandoned remains of a mine shaft, a subject that inspired and puzzled him for a number of weeks, and of which he made a number of paintings, quite varied, of which almost a dozen fine paintings are extant, and later a coloured drypoint, which has a remarkable number of variants in colour and states.

Milne described this pool this way:

"To the miner it may be a disappointment but to the painter in search of color it is a find. Everything in the way of color that there is and in all possible intensities and combinations. The pits are filled with water. Some apple green (milky) in the middle with yellow in the shallower parts. Another one is bottle green in the middle (clear) bordered with golden leaves. The sulphur in the water coats everything with a film of yellow."

Red Pool is an exceptionally fine painting, one in which the brilliance of the colours in the pit is contrasted most effectively with the faceted bedrock that surrounds the pool, which Milne depicts as chiefly black but with fissures and cracks defined with thin red lines. The larger compositional elements and the placement of them, such as the small strip of trees and sky in the upper left corner and the large hump of blasted rock piled on the right side, are so firmly set that one is easily convinced of the accuracy, and the sharp beauty, of what one is looking at.