EAST OF THE COPPERMINE

oil on panel

10.25 x 13.5 in. (26 x 34.3 cm)

Price Realized:

24150.00 CAD.

INCLUDES BUYER’S PREMIUM

Notes:

inscribed verso with notations and the names of a number of individuals for whom canvases were produced from this sketch.

Provenance: Former collection of Burton Taylor (B.T.) Richardson, Winnipeg. Richardson was a journalist and attaché to John Diefenbaker. He authored “Canada and Mr. Diefenbaker” (1962) the year then P.M. abandoned his ambitious “Northern Vision”.

A. Y. Jackson was an adventurer who often accepted invitations to travel to remote areas of Canada’s north. He would return to his studio with sketches to be painted as larger canvases. In “A Painter’s Country” (p. 135) he explains, “We, with our notes and sketches, hoped to give Canadians some idea of the strange beauty of our northern possessions”.

Jackson was aware of an early attempt by Bell and Camsell (with the Geological Survey of Canada) to cross overland to the Coppermine in 1900, with a near disastrous outcome. In 1950 he would first realize his long-standing desire to “get into the Barren Lands” north-east of Great Bear Lake. The group picked out a sketching ground from the air, in an Eldorado Mines plane, and stayed for a week. Jackson writes (p. 184):

“The Barren Lands country was so fascinating that I returned there the following year….We flew farther east over the Coppermine River and came down on a lake near September Mountains, sixty miles south of the Coppermine settlement on the Arctic Ocean. It was a lovely country to walk over, with short grass and moss like a carpet, gently rolling hills with occasional rock outcrops and many little lakes.”