Dr. Frederick Banting will forever be renowned for the irreplaceable contribution that his co-discovery of insulin made to the world. His second life as an artist, however, is a significant contribution as well. He traveled across Canada and around the globe, sketching on site in oil paint and in pencil. His accomplished pencil sketches are, in fact, a key to a mystery of this double-sided work.

The signature side features imagery very likely produced on one of his many trips to Quebec with A.Y. Jackson. The verso image, however, appears to be of the Colin Range, in Jasper, Alberta, some 3,300 kilometres away as the crow flies. Since Banting did not routinely title, date or even sign his paintings, secondary sources must often be used to determine such details. Thankfully, many of his sketchbooks still exist, and they contain information that ties together these disparate images.

In sketchbooks dated to 1928, Banting rapturously sketched multiple scenes of the Rocky Mountains. In the summer of that year, he and Jackson journeyed up the Athabasca River to the Northwest Territories, evidently first paying a visit to nearby Jasper. Similarly dated sketchbooks also indicate that Banting accompanied Jackson on his trip to rural Quebec earlier that spring. One particular sketch not only corresponds to the imagery of the painting but also includes the colour note “Cobalt” in relation to the church’s spire. The steeple is indeed blue in our oil sketch—likely Banting’s depiction of its patinated copper cladding. Painted months and leagues apart, these images comprise a rare complete double-sided work in the artist’s larger sketch size, and the contrasting subject matter renders the work singularly unique.

The provenance of this work is also exceptional. Its previous owner was Dr. Elizabeth Margaret Forbes, chief of radiology at Women’s College Hospital, Toronto, from 1955 to 1975. Amongst her formidable professional accomplishments, she is noted for co-writing one of Canada’s earliest journal articles on mammography. Dr. Forbes’s co-author on this paper was none other than Dr. Henrietta Banting, then director of Women’s College Hospital’s Cancer Detection Clinic. It was from Henrietta Banting, Frederick Banting’s second wife, that Dr. Forbes originally acquired this fine work.