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Condition: Jackson's first trip to the Rockies was with J.W. Beatty in 1914. They went to Jasper with the expectation of obtaining a commission from the Canadian Northern Railway to paint scenic spots along the line. The contract did not materialize and Jackson, who found the locations along the tracks uninspiring, later destroyed most of his sketches. In 1924, accompanied by Lawren Harris, he again tackled the area around Jasper. In Jasper Park is a rare canvas from this trip. Unlike Harris's mountains which became more abstract, spiritual and less concerned with topographical detail, Jackson painted from the valleys looking up and allowed himself ample space for both fore- and mid-ground. Jackson places the mountains in the top half of the work rising up behind a row of snow-laden pine trees, their verticality contrasting with the horizontal lines of the contours and clouds. This stage setting has the purple and red colours in the trees echoed in the rocky outcroppings of the stoney ridges and snow. In the foreground, Jackson weaves a wave-like landscape of sculptured drifts similar to the rolling countryside of his much-painted Laurentians. The rough surface of the jute canvas reinforces the illusion of heavy snowdrifts. The cerulean sky and the cool purple shade of the mountains is reflected in the snow. The brush work is textured and layered in colour to give both remarkable volume and depth. This painting was exhibited in the 1925 Group of Seven exhibition and a reviewer for the Star Weekly wrote "The painters [Group of Seven] certainly are evolving. They have been successively, and generally successfully, house-haunted, tree-mad, lake-lunatic, river-ridden, birch-bed lamed, apsen-addled and rock-cracked. This year they are mountain mad." Mountain 'madness' may well have seized the members of the Group, but the results of their inspiration were some of their finest canvases -- works on a heroic scale, such as this one.
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Provenance: Private Collection, Victoria
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Exhibited: Group of Seven Exhibition at The Art Gallery of Toronto, Toronto, January 9th - February 2nd, 1925, no. 22 Exhibition of the Group of 7 and Art in French Canada, Toronto, May 7th - 31st, 1926, no. 45 Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, August 28th - September 11th, 1926, no. 191 Victoria Collects, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, May 26th - June 27th, 1976, no. 37
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Literature: Charles D. Hill, The Group of Seven, Art for a Nation, Ottawa, 1996, p. 157
