Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:

Augustus Bridle, “Pictures of the Group of Seven Art Show, ‘Art Must Take the Road,’” Toronto Daily Star, 20 May 1922.

Note:

A charter member of the Group of Seven, Arthur Lismer was motivated to express the spirit of Canada through landscape painting. Joining his fellow artists on painting trips to the north shore of Lake Superior and the Algoma region, Lismer’s contributions to the Group’s body of work depicted the Canadian terrain as more angular and rough than his counterparts. In 1922, Augustus Bridle wrote: “Of the group (Lismer) is the most restless, and is only now toning down to a point where he can begin to size up to a really big thing on its merits… I think Lismer understands his art better as yet than he has been able to illustrate it. But he is becoming more clarified and simple and it is gaining strength.”

It was in Lismer’s later work that his style reached maturation – lending a gentleness to the wilds; softened and literal. His concentration shifted from expansive scenes toward tightly framed and close-up formations of land and vegetation.

In 1951, Arthur Lismer made his first trip to Long Beach on the west coast of Vancouver Island. For 16 subsequent summers, he returned to the area to paint scenes of the seashore and of the nearby forest. Like the bulk of his paintings from his time on Long Beach, Beach Scene demonstrates Lismer’s intimate familiarity with natural forms. A tangle of shells, driftwood, and flotsam, are to Lismer a potpourri of cadmium orange and green, mauve and greys.