Alexander Young Jackson 1882 - 1974

Acquired directly from the artist (1960s)
Private Collection, Montréal
Private Collection

Madawaska is a small hamlet that lies just south of Algonquin Park and at the head of the Madawaska River that flows south and east from there. With its many lakes and streams, the region was a favourite place for artists to find congenial landscapes to paint. Not too far south of there was Bon Echo, a place well known to members of the Group of Seven and to many others involved in the arts, since it was a sort of artistic mecca for a number of years in the 1920s.

Jackson, always on the move to find new things and places to paint, knew the area well and painted there on a number of occasions. In this instance, he appear to have chosen a large part of, if not all of the village itself. He has delighted himself with the line of cabins with their roofs of many colours, set against the snowy hillside, the scrubby bush, and the eventful sky.

The area today, although much more populated, is still marginal farming, cottage country, fishing and hunting terrain, and a mecca more for canoeists who train for white water paddling on the Madawaska River than for artists like Jackson. He was there to document the place, as he had done for the small villages along the St. Lawrence, and, considering he was then in his mid-eighties,  he did it with both joy and an admirable amount of imagination and skill.