Additional Images

Literature:

Ian Lumsden, Drawings by Jack Weldon Humphrey, exhibition catalogue, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, 1977, pages 20-21.
Russell Harper, Jack Humphrey: a painter in the Maritimes, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, n.d, pages 12-13.

Note:

Humphrey is known primarily as a figure and landscape painter. Works like this lot are both rare and important to understanding Humphrey’s career arc. Lumsden writes: “Recognizing his need for stimulation offered by major art centres especially in the area of contemporary forms of plastic expression, he applied for a Royal Society Overseas Fellowship offered by the Canadian Government and was successful. In November 1952, he and his wife left for France where they were to remain for the next thirteen months...In his compositions he began to break up the surface by outlining each shape in black thereby flattening it and thus abstracting it. This facilitated the structuring of a work based exclusively on the vocabulary of painting, the employment of the elements of form and colour in a non-associative manner.”

Russell Harper writes: “Discontent with a routine pattern of landscape painting, still life and occasional portraiture become evident after the conclusion of the war. Regionalism, with the paintings of street scenes and the waterfront had had valid meaning, but it was now a tired form of expression...Contemporary avant-garde Parisian exhibitions gave Humphrey new confidence in free experimentation...[and since] then, non-objective tendencies have dominated much of his painting.”