Canadian Paintings, Prints, and Drawings.

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This handsome, heavy, large format book is a treasure to be returned to often and enjoyed at leisure, page by page. Canadian Paintings, Prints and Drawings presents, in full-colour, 164 of Canada’s best-known artists from across the country. The time period is equally generous, as it covers from the 17th century to the start of the 21st. The artists are organized alphabetically, not chronologically, thus allowing them to stand on their own. The text that faces each full-colour single reproduction provides a brief biographical sketch of the artist and a commentary on the subject matter and style. There is a five-page glossary of selected terms and movements, such as abstract expressionism, abstraction, academy, automatistes, baroque, the Beaver Hall Group, the Canadian Group of Painters (an expansion of the better known Group Of Seven), Classicism, Cubism, Fauvism, Impressionism, Neo-Classicism, the Painters Eleven, Pop Art, Post-Impressionism, Romanticism, Surrealism, and Trompe L’Oeil. (The latter is a French term meaning “to fool the eye.”)

The illustrations offer a wonderfully broad representation of Canadian paintings, prints, and drawings, as the title promises. Some are scenic, resembling a photograph taken from the high point of a town or cliff. Arthur Lismer’s Bright Land allows the viewer to stand high on a hill top in the Killarney region of Ontario and paint a cool, deep lake below, untouched by settlement or industry. Painter Lawren Harris describes Lismer’s scene as having captured one of nature’s “pristine and shining moods.” Writing later, Lismer said the artist’s proper “business” in any age or country, “is to recall not facts and formulae, but the beauty of the experience … to push aside veils from unseeing eyes.”

Canadian Paints, Prints and Drawings is an exceptional collection. The text is relatively brief, but so well-planned as to be the equal of much long commentaries. There is a general index, three pages of “further reading,” and two pages of museums and galleries. Newland’s visual and textual presentation of Canadian prints and drawings belongs in every library and many homes.