David Brown Milne 1882 - 1953

Douglas Duncan, Picture Loan Society, Toronto (1941)

Estate of E.R. Hunter, West Palm Beach, Florida

After his service as a war artist in 1918-19, Milne's production reached a remarkable peak of achievement in the winter of 1919-1920 when he returned to Boston Corners. By the late summer of 1920, after a break of a month or so for gardening in the spring and early summer (and then likely no painting at all in June or July), Milne was again experiencing another surge of intense activity. Beginning with this work on August 20^th, and over the next month, he produced a run of watercolours that included half a dozen of the most seminal and accomplished works in this medium of his entire career.

The Kelly ore bed was a favourite place for Milne from his early explorations of Boston Corners' nooks and crannies; it's ponds, which were probably created a few decades earlier as pits for use in smelting iron ore, were particularly alluring for Milne because of their reflections.

Milne wrote notes on nearly every painting he did during this period, and his notes about this painting, while self-deprecating as he so often was, are valuable:

The most interesting thing in the picture is the treatment of the reflections. This treatment was developed in the spring of either 1917 or 1916. For the maple trees near Lee's [a nearby farmer from whom Milne rented a house ($6 a month!)] in spring I planned to use a thin wash of color over the black and white line drawing; the bare branches and trunks were drawn with a black line, then a light tint was washed freely over the drawing – that is over isolated trees, not over the whole picture. I used a gray tint on some and a reddish tint on others. This was not satisfactory but I became interested in the soft texture of the lines that were washed over. Shortly after this I used the texture for the upper, distant part of drawings made from above Mrs. McDonald's house and from the hill behind our house. It was in the fall of either of these two years that I first used it for reflections in water.

This openness is one of the things to be noted in using the texture. Unless one uses thin black lines and small spots of color, thus leaving an unusual amount of white paper, too much color will be washed off, obscuring the shapes. The velvety texture of the spots and particularly of the thin black lines is the interesting feature, not the tint made by the surplus color, though this too has some value in simplifying the picture by binding the water part into one mass.

The paintings from this short stretch along Milne's aesthetic path are among his very best – the most challenging, the most innovative, and the most enduring.