Signed and dated 1941 and verso titled and inscribed ‘11’

Prov:
Ex. Collection of Robert F. Christy and Dagmar von Lieven Christy, Vancouver By descent to the present Private Collection, California

Literature:
Joyce Zemans, Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape, A Retrospective Exhibition, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1981, page 101

The first collectors of this painting were Robert F. Christy and Dagmar von Lieven Christy. Robert was a prominent Canadian American theoretical physicist and astrophysicist. After graduating from the University of British Columbia, he studied physics at the University of California under Robert Oppenheimer. Christy worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago during World War II, then with Oppenheimer at the project’s Los Alamos laboratory. In 1960 he turned his attention to astrophysics, ultimately winning the Eddington Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society for his research.

Jock Macdonald spent the summer of 1941 in the Rockies with Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris. Both artists were striving for an art that transcended the mundane, and in the Rockies, they found a stunning landscape that embodied the spiritual. Joyce Zemans writes, “At Lake O’Hara, the mighty glaciers offered what Harris described as ‘a channel into our essential inner life, a door to our deepest understanding, wherein we have a capacity for universal experience.” In this powerful and rugged painting of Ringrose Peak towering above Lake O’Hara, Macdonald has captured a vision of the majesty and cosmic harmony that he and Harris perceived in the Rockies.

James Williamson Galloway "Jock" Macdonald (1897-1960) was a pivotal figure in the development of abstract art in Canada. Born in Thurso, Scotland, Macdonald began his career as a designer before moving to Canada in 1926 to teach at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts. Influenced by the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, his early work focused on landscape painting. However, Macdonald’s artistic journey led him to explore abstraction, becoming a key figure in Canadian modernism.

Macdonald co-founded the British Columbia College of Arts and played a significant role in establishing the Calgary Group in 1947. His dedication to abstract art deepened when he became a founding member of Painters Eleven in Toronto. Through his teaching positions at the Ontario College of Art and other institutions, he influenced a new generation of artists, promoting avant-garde techniques like automatism. Macdonald’s contributions to abstract painting were recognized with a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1960, securing his place as a pioneer of Canadian abstract art.