Although A.J. Casson was born and spent most of his life in Toronto, he maintained an abiding connection to the city of Hamilton. The artist’s family moved there when he was 14, and his first childhood encounters with art were in classes at the Hamilton Technical School. He apprenticed at a Hamilton lithography company the following year, beginning his lifelong relationship with the rigours of graphic design. Within two years his family returned to Toronto, where the emergent artist continued his studies under artist Harry Britton and forged ahead in his commercial career.

Beginning at Brigden’s Ltd., he soon moved to Rous & Mann Ltd., where he apprenticed under future fellow Group of Seven member Franklin Carmichael. When Carmichael moved to competitors Sampson-Matthews Ltd., Casson followed. He would be employed there for the next 30 years, eventually rising to the role of art director and vice-president.

It was via Sampson-Matthews that Casson’s relationship with Hamilton continued. In the 1940s and ’50s, one of the accounts Casson was associated with was for Tuckett Tobacco, founded in Hamilton by Englishman George Elias Tuckett. Casson would regularly travel to Hamilton to advise the company on their advertising campaigns. During this time, as a noted and celebrated painter, he also became an unofficial advisor to the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Then housed in a one-storey Art Deco building near McMaster University, the AGH and its director-curator, Thomas Reid MacDonald, would sometimes seek out Casson’s advice on various matters relating to the gallery.

Undoubtedly it was through this relationship that Holiday Island became part of the gallery’s art rental program. Although Casson was represented exclusively by Toronto’s Roberts Gallery, he sold this work to the AGH in May of 1959, likely towards the goal of fundraising. As is stamped on the gallery’s Picture Loan Library label, this work was loaned out three times for $25 per rental before it was purchased for $250 in March 1962 by a private collection, on whose behalf it is now being offered.

Like many of Casson’s studio works, Holiday Island is a probable composite of different on-site oil sketches. He was known to lay out sketches in his studio, selecting the foreground from one and the sky from another, arriving at a new, decidedly intentional composition. Highly stylized, the elongated, theatrical forms in this work are hallmarks of Casson’s mid-1950s neo-Cubist explorations, sometimes referred to by the artist as his “Box Period.” What exceptional examples such as this one express is a heightened vision of the world that remains remarkably authentic.

Take, for example, the qualities of the water: the characteristics of the still and moving surface are distinctly simplified but still feel resonantly genuine. The swirling gulls, too, are essentialized, but not only is their sense of flight notably true, so is their placement within three-dimensional space. Casson’s ability to convey dimensionality was exceptional, carefully honed over his many decades as a designer. At the heart of the composition, the elongated boathouse verges on Gothic in form, although a partial explanation for this may be that its function may have been to house a sailboat. Boathouses capable of housing a sailboat and its mast can still be found on Muskoka-region lakes such as Rosseau and Joseph, although most are now historic in nature. Here, in classic forms and colour choices, Casson masterfully constructs an image of serene harmony and subtle drama.