PROVENANCE
Fine Jewellery and Important Canadian Art, Sotheby’s Canada, October 30, 1985, lot 429
Private Collection, Toronto
By descent to the present Private Estate, Toronto

Frank Hans Johnston, who changed his first name to Franz around 1926, is a singular figure in Canadian art history. A highly skilled commercial designer, a founding member of the Group of Seven and a distinguished teacher, Johnston is perhaps misunderstood due to his decision to separate himself from the Group following their first exhibition, in 1920. This separation was because Johnston left Toronto in 1921 to take up duties as head of the College of Art in Winnipeg, where he remained until his return to Toronto in 1924.

A painter of great energy, Johnston had an extensive exhibiting career and, as his biographer, Roger Burford Mason, has noted, admirers “flocked in their thousands to his shows and bought his pictures to decorate and give some cultural depth to their homes.”[1] Indeed, in the eyes of some, as Mason argues, Johnston had been denigrated for being too successful as an artist.[2]

While we cannot be sure of the location depicted in his canvas Autumn Landscape, it is possibly an image of Lake of the Woods, which Johnston first painted when he was in Winnipeg and returned to several times throughout his career. Regardless of the setting of the painting, it is a large and commanding image of the Canadian landscape. Indeed, few Group of Seven canvases are of this physical scale.

Johnston clearly wanted Autumn Landscape to make a substantial visual statement. The composition, with its richly coloured bushes in the lower foreground, screen of slender birch trees, sweeping lake, mountains and expansive sky, is richly satisfying and was carefully thought out by Johnston. The critic W.G. Colgate noted in a review: “Essentially Mr. Johnston is a painter of light and more particularly of that clear, warm, mellow light that emanates from skies almost cloudless as on a Summer’s day, or white hazy as in Autumn.”[3]

Johnston’s use of sunlight within this composition is especially striking. The close foreground is in shadow, but the trunks of the birches and parts of the brush immediately behind them are strongly lit by the sunlight coming from the right side of the canvas. This flow of light is further emphasized by the brilliantly lit portion of the mountain in the middle ground and the highlights on the mountaintops in the centre of the canvas. Above the mountains, on the far side of the lake, is a relatively flat sky with two large clouds. The sky provides a strong background for the leaves of the birches, which enliven the upper part of the composition. Johnston highlights the importance of these soaring, slender birch trees through his careful attention to the detail of their trunks and fall foliage.

His subject is a simple one—a sunlit autumnal landscape—but his painterly skills subtly reveal the richness, vitality and grandeur of that landscape. Consider, for example, the enormous variety of colour, brush-stroke and texture Johnston has used in the brush in the foreground. Despite the lack of detail, we get a convincing impression of the richness and variety of the foliage.

Johnston’s pictorial vision, like that of his Group of Seven colleagues, encourages the viewer to revel in both the beauty and the majesty of the Canadian landscape. The fact that we, as viewers, are so convinced by his vision of this landscape is a measure of Johnston’s gifts as a painter.

We thank Ian M. Thom, senior curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 1988 to 2018, for contributing the above essay.

1. Roger Burford Mason, A Grand Eye for Glory: A Life of Franz Johnston (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1998), 13.

2. Ibid., 14.

3. Quoted in ibid., 62.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars