Alexander Young Jackson 1882 - 1974

Private Collection, Port Hope

Although Jackson generously said that J.E.H. MacDonald ‘owned’ Algoma, since MacDonald’s paintings of that rugged area were so brilliant, heroic almost, Jackson’s own work there also reached a new high-water mark. This compact, rich, and colourful panel has to count as one of his triumphant successes.

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, as Canadians in all walks of life worked to reshape their lives, the artists who had formed the ‘Algonquin Group’ in the few years prior to 1914 also gathered to pick up where they had left off four years earlier. In Algoma, the region to which Harris led them in the fall of 1919, they found an inspiring terrain. More than that, however, they found that competing with each other raised the stakes and the results of their daily efforts. The better and more forceful one became, the more forceful and better all of them became. Certainly that was true of Jackson, MacDonald, Harris, and Johnston, who were together on that first trip, which Harris laid on for them by outfitting a railway box car in which they could live in relative comfort, and spend most of their time painting. Harris also arranged to have it shunted from one siding to another now and again so they could cover different parts of the region.

Jackson’s Dead Jack Pine is indeed a minor triumph. In it he calls up his recollections of his years in France and the brighter side of the Impressionist style to which he was at that time indebted. The electric aquamarine blue in the sky and the broken line of orangey red snaking across the foreground are bold assertions of his energetic and innovative capabilities that carried him through the next decade or so of great painting.