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HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE 35
119 FRANK HANS (FRANZ) JOHNSTON
ARCA CSPWC G7 OSA 1888 ~ 1949
Algoma Tapestry
oil on panel, signed Frank H. Johnston
and on verso titled and dated 1918
12 x 15 3/4 in, 30.5 x 40 cm
PROVENANCE:
Roberts Gallery, Toronto
Family of Tom Thomson
By descent to the present Private Collection, Calgary
LITERATURE:
Charles C. Hill, The Group of Seven, Art for A Nation,
National Gallery of Canada, 1995, page 83
Roger Burford Mason, A Grand Eye for Glory: A Life
of Franz Johnston, 1998, page 36
Algoma Tapestry is a rare early work that not only comes from the very
first boxcar trip taken by Frank Johnston, Lawren Harris and J.E.H.
MacDonald to Algoma, but also has a special provenance, having passed
by descent through the family of Tom Thomson to auction with Heffel.
This fine work, exemplary of Johnston’s decorative and panoramic style,
was painted in the fall of 1918 when the aforementioned artists, together
with James MacCallum, went by train from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie,
and from there to Canyon, 113 miles north, where they spent a week
painting the vivid and ever~changing autumn landscape. From Canyon
they moved to Hubert on the Montreal River and then on to Batchawana,
returning to Toronto in early October. Despite the poor weather and
constant grey skies, Johnston was prolific, producing 33 plein air
sketches. Upon his return to Toronto, he, Harris and MacDonald drew
on this material to produce sufficient work to mount a show at The Art
Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) in April of 1919, a
show that was considered a success. In their accompanying text, the
artists called upon their audience to accept the works as “evidence that
Canadian artists were interested in the discovery of their own country.”
Brief statements, later termed “Algomaxims”, accompanied the works,
such as “The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our
own country.” Another stated, “The old masters were young servants
once,” and would have been directed at painters far senior to the fledgling
members of the Group, but holds a telling irony for us looking back at
their work now.
The pictures were arranged chronologically, documenting the course of
the journey as well as the changing colours of autumn. One can assume
then ~ by comparison with other works from this trip ~ that Algoma
Tapestry, due to the still~bright greens of the deciduous trees, is a very
early first boxcar trip sketch. A second boxcar trip and another show
followed in the fall of 1919, and it was on these two trips that Johnston
sketched many of the scenes that would inspire his masterworks now
residing in major public collections. The boxcar trips are an
extraordinary, almost mythic, chapter in Canadian art history, wherein
likeminded individuals experienced something quite profound and
produced work that has shaped the national identity of Canada’s visual
arts. We tend to see the Group as a unit, and the danger of this lies in
forgetting that each painter was a very unique artist with his own
individual aspirations. Johnston was a family man, an especially strong
individualist, and felt that he could forge a path on his own, having had
better sales at his solo exhibitions than he did with the Group. The
camaraderie and critical discourse of the artists who would become the
Group of Seven was highly influential in Johnston’s work, but not so
much as to influence his work to be similar to theirs; conversely, Johnston
sought stylistic independence. He wanted his work to be discernable
from that of the others, and would soon break from the Group, taking a
job in Winnipeg shortly after the painters formalized themselves as the
Group of Seven.
Johnston’s work is indeed different ~ he often selected a more panoramic
view than his fellow painters, a feeling conveyed as much by the open
treatment of the skies and forests in his works as by his ability to capture
depth and pattern with clarity. His works are generally less tangled and
wild, showing us a more approachable sort of wilderness. Sadly, Johnston
would destroy much of his early Group period work in the 1930s;
Franklin Arbuckle speaks of the artist “destroying about a hundred of his
Group of Seven paintings” at that time. This lack of material has no doubt
left gaps in our appreciation of Johnston’s work and further confirms the
rarity of Algoma Tapestry.
ESTIMATE: $40,000 ~ 50,000