Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Nova Scotia

Literature:

Donald W. Buchanan (ed.), Canadian Painters, Phaidon Press Ltd, U.K., 1945, no. 30, for the canvas, reproduced.
J.E.H. MacDonald, R.C.A. 1873-1932, Art Gallery of Toronto, 1966, page 19, no. 9, for the canvas, reproduced and page 45, no. 50 for the Laidlaw sketch, reproduced.
Jeremy Adamson, Lawren S. Harris, Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes 1906-1930, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978, page 35.
Paul Duval, The Tangled Garden: The Art of J.E.H. MacDonald, Scarborough, 1978, pages 43-44, and page 31 for the canvas, reproduced in colour.
Bruce Whiteman, J.E.H. MacDonald, Quarry Press, Kingston, 1995, page 27, page 28, for the canvas, reproduced in colour.

Note:

Tracks and Traffic has been called a “signal work”, “MacDonald’s first truly notable creation” and his earliest “masterpiece”. The canvas for this work was exhibited in the 1912 Ontario Society of Artists exhibition and was executed at a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. MacDonald had decided to leave his full-time employment in the commercial art business to devote himself to painting full-time. Released from the day-to-day demands of a regular job, MacDonald was to embark on producing his first great pictures.

Tracks and Traffic (the canvas) is a studio painting that would have been worked up from plein-air sketches. We know of at least two such sketches produced by the artist: one in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, where the canvas also hangs, and this lot.

By 1912, the year this work was executed, MacDonald had met Lawren Harris, who in 1911 had seen a private show of MacDonald’s sketches at the Arts & Letters Club in Toronto and sought him out. Adamson writes that during the winter of 1911-1912 both artists “are sketching together in the vicinity of the gas works at the foot of Bathurst Street from which J.E.H. did Tracks and Traffic his most ambitious work up to that time.”

Harris and MacDonald both were looking for a new language to describe the Canadian landscape experience and while this work is, as Adamson points out, reminiscent of Whistler, The Hague School, Barbizon painters, and the Impressionists with its use of atmospheric effects, it was a reflection of The Canadian Art Club (1908-1915) whose members “were Canada’s most modern” and so “was an attempt to bring a more progressive, painterly European manner into Canadian Art.” Furthermore, Paul Duval writes: “Unlike Monet who tackled his similar Gare St. Lazare theme ten times, MacDonald got industrial out of his system with this one brilliant effort” in which industry is “transformed into visual poetry.”