THROUGH THE EYES OF J.E.H. MACDONALD

In the spring of 2026, Gardner Galleries had the privilege of presenting a major private estate collection of Canadian art, distinguished by several exceptional works by members of the Group of Seven. Among the highlights were a 20 x 26‑inch oil on canvas by A.J. Casson, a 1952 oil on panel by Edwin Holgate, and a 1933 watercolour by Franklin Carmichael. The collectors, a couple who lived well into their nineties, assembled their collection over a span of seventy years, thoughtfully curating and cherishing this remarkable group of works in their Old South London residence.

The collection also featured important examples by Florence Carlyle, Goodridge Roberts, J.W. Beatty, Maurice Cullen, Robert Pilot, Manly MacDonald, Marc‑Aurèle de Foy Suzor‑Coté, Frances Anne Hopkins, Lucius O’Brien, John B. Wilkinson, Clarence Gagnon and Horatio Walker.

We are pleased to introduce the final paintings from this same esteemed collection in our upcoming Fall 2026 Fine Art Auction, led by a 1931 oil on board and its companion graphite sketch by J.E.H. MacDonald.

The oil painting was acquired by the couple in 1976 from McCready Galleries, Toronto, and the companion drawing was purchased fifty years later when it appeared at auction at Joyner Waddington’s in May of 2006. A particularly compelling point of interest lies in the contrasting vantage points between the two works: in the oil, the central tree bends to the left, while in the preparatory graphite study it sways to the right, offering a rare glimpse into MacDonald’s evolving compositional approach.

The year 1931 marked MacDonald’s final period of painting in Canada before he suffered a stroke, subsequently relocating to Barbados and passed away the following year in 1932.

Comparable views of Sturgeon Bay by MacDonald are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

We extend our sincere thanks to Andrew Kear, Head of Programs at Museum London, for providing the accompanying essay on these two significant works, presented below:

The life of J.E.H. MacDonald was one of marked contrast. A “gentle, sincere man” possessed of a “great sense of humour” as one colleague, A.J. Casson, recalled in the 1970s, MacDonald’s work was also the target of some of the most acerbic public derision in Canadian art history. He was an Englishman who was celebrated by fellow-painter C.W. Jefferys for the “refreshing absence” his canvases revealed “of Europe, or anything else, save Canada.” Quiet and private, he was also laser-focused and resolute; with Lawren Harris, as Paul Duval notes, the Group of Seven’s “moving spirit.”

Although James Edward Hervey MacDonald was born, in 1873, at Durham in north-east England, his ancestors had been among the first British colonists to settle in North America in the mid-1600s. The rugged landscape of his youth primed his poetic sensibility and sparked the love he would later hold for Ontario’s forests and lakes. Despite his lack of formal education, MacDonald was a natural autodidact who cherished Western literature, from Shakespeare and Goethe to Walt Whitman and John Ruskin.

When MacDonald was 14 his family made its ancestral return to North America, settling in Hamilton, where the teenager attended evening art classes. After relocating a few years later to Toronto, MacDonald found work at Grip Ltd., arguably the city’s leading design firm where he remained for nearly two decades, rising to the position of head designer.

In 1899 he married Harriet Joan Lavis and the couple settled in a relatively remote, pastoral part of the city, near High Park. They shared a love for the American poet and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, and named their only child, who would go on to become an artist and designer of note in his own right, after him. It was at this time that MacDonald first began painting in oil while attending Saturday morning lessons with George Reid. This comparatively cosmopolitan academic Impressionist, who had studied in Paris and under American master Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia, would go on to become the principal at the Ontario College of Art (OCA). Increasingly uninspired by his commercial day job, MacDonald spent evenings and weekends painting outdoors in High Park and along the Humber River, eventually joining the Toronto Art Students’ League, an informal collective loosely united by a growing sense of Canadian nationalism. 

In 1912 MacDonald moved north to Thornhill, left his day job, and struck out to pursue his art career full-time. At Grip Ltd. he had met, mentored, and befriended several of the artists that would go on to form the Group of Seven including Arthur Lismer and Franklin Carmichael. Tom Thomson, whose life was tragically cut short in 1917, became particularly close friends with MacDonald. The fraternity grew through the Arts and Letters Club, where MacDonald made the acquaintance of both A.Y. Jackson and the independently wealthy Lawren Harris.

The period between 1911 and 1919 was crucially formative for MacDonald. He staged his first solo exhibition, saw a highly influential exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian painting at Buffalo, and realized major canvases including Tracks and Traffic (1912), The Tangled Garden (1916), and The Beaver Dam (1919). He expanded his creative stomping ground beyond Toronto to the “north country”—Georgian Bay, Muskoka, Mattawa, Algonquin Park, the Laurentians, and Algoma— writing that it provided him “that [morning air] that Henry Thoreau writes about…which he wanted to bottle and keep on draught against old age.” His preferred subject matter included roiling water, looming ridges, and dramatic shadow-casting skies. The lone pine that features in these later works, Muskoka Point and Sturgeon Bay, is comparatively rare within MacDonald’s oeuvre, the motif more closely associated with the canvases of Frederick Varley, Arthur Lismer, and Tom Thomson. In 1916 MacDonald’s work became the target of acerbic criticism in the Toronto press. One critic famously compared a canvas to the contents of a drunkard’s stomach. MacDonald, always unflappable, always the serious one in the room, met the extravagant vitriol with calm, questioning eloquence: “they condemn,” he observed, “without understanding and without making any effort to understand.” Later, in the 1920s, he would travel to Nova Scotia and make regular painting pilgrimages to the Rocky Mountains. 

In 1920 MacDonald and six colleagues staged the first Group of Seven exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (today the Art Gallery of Ontario). MacDonald exhibited in all eight subsequent Group exhibitions before it disbanded in 1931. In 1921, seeking financial stability, he assumed a full courseload of teaching at the OCA. Although dismaying that art instruction left him with less time for his own work—“I would gladly become a vagabond… [and] do nothing the rest of my life but sketch and paint and study nature outdoors”—he proved an inspired teacher to many. In 1929 he assumed the principalship of the College, a promotion that cut further into his own painting practice. His one sketching trip in 1931, a particularly busy year, took him as far as McGregor Bay in Algoma, on his way from or to which we surmise he made Muskoka Point and Sturgeon Bay. The precise location, with the shared subject matter, is not entirely clear. Both were posthumously titled and signed (not an uncommon practice). Sturgeon Bay near Point au Baril seems, at first, the most likely setting. However, another oil study at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Windy Day, McLean’s Island, Sturgeon Bay (1931) suggests a different location—McLean’s Island—much closer to Parry Sound. 

Muskoka Point and Sturgeon Bay offer two slightly different vantage points, the lone pine veering to the right in the drawing, to the left in the oil study. Both give insight into MacDonald’s working method and aesthetic values. The composition of Sturgeon Bay comprises stacked tonal blocks, the fore-, middle-, and backgrounds providing three distinct staging grounds, with the tree’s backlit, multitiered silhouette serving as their unifying spine. Muskoka Point adds atmospheric dimension and luminosity to the scene. The recessive blue and mauve comingling in rock and tree alike lends the image its cohesion. The sky, divided by the pine, shimmers and churns—bucolic, but not quite tame. 

The 1931 trip, skirting Georgian Bay up to Algoma, was likely the last MacDonald undertook in Canada. He suffered a mild stroke in November 1931, took a leave of absence from the College, sailing to Barbados to recuperate in January 1932. He returned to Toronto in May, before succumbing to a massive stroke in November 1932.