Alexander Young Jackson 1882 - 1974

Laing Galleries, Toronto
Private Collection, Vancouver

One of Jackson’s endearing characteristics is his recognizable ‘handwriting’ in painting. His flowing brushstrokes and curvilinear interpretations of landscapes can be identified at a glance. What tends to reinforce his style of painting is his habitual use of standard sizes of either panels (8½ × 10½ or 10½ × 13½) or canvases (21 × 26 or 26 × 32). But every now and again Jackson surprises us by stepping outside his habitual patterns as he has done with this long and striking panorama of Murray Bay.

This aerial view sweeps us from a small portion of the bay itself–with one house and a few out buildings overlooking it–and over the far shore of the bay and the undulating but rectangular fields that form the central hub of the painting. Circled around it, however, are the line of scrub bush and then the stand of pine trees marching back from near the shore to the tall pine on the lower right corner; and that pine is connected, visually, with the right limit of the distant and time-rounded and worn hills of the Charlevoix region, which close the circle. The weight of the far hills, with their deep browns and careful articulation of form, lends sobriety and gravitas to the painting as a whole.

One might have wished that Jackson had stepped out of his normal routines more often, if he had been moved to create more paintings like this one. Certainly he was more than capable of doing so, even it he declined to attempt it more often than we would have liked.