PROVENANCE
Milne sale to the Right Honourable Charles Vincent Massey, 1934
Laing Galleries, Toronto, 1958
Henry G. Vail, Ottawa, 1959
Laing Galleries, Toronto
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Ontario, circa 1972

LITERATURE
David Milne Jr. and David P. Silcox, David B. Milne: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume 2: 1929 – 1952, 1998, reproduced page 574, catalogue #303.14

In the early 1930s, David Milne decided that he needed to separate himself from his wife Patsy and moved to Six Mile Lake, in the Muskoka region of Ontario. This move to a more extreme, pared-down landscape was a dramatic shift in his approach to painting. River Shore is an early example of his new approach. The image pares down the landscape to only the most essential elements: a small group of scraggly logs on the foreshore, an expanse of water, and a distant treed shoreline, indicated by a roughly painted passage of white paint atop orange beneath a strip of sky. The image, only just representational, is as close to abstraction as Milne gets. He remains interested in the actuality of landscape but here celebrates his remarkable command of line and colour—exemplified by the subtle purple shadows beneath the logs in the foreground. This use of colour, as in the whole image, is at once audacious and convincing. Milne has made what was likely a stark vista into a striking and compelling image which, like all good paintings, demands active looking from the viewer.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars