Lot 103: James Williamson Galloway (Jock) Macdonald 1897 -

James Williamson Galloway (Jock) Macdonald 1897 - 1960 Canadian oil on board Castle Towers - Garibaldi Park, BC 12 x 14 7/8 inches 30.5 x 37.8 centimeters signed and dated 1943 and on verso signed and titled Literature:Joyce Zemans, Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape / A Retrospective Exhibition, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1981, page 101, the related 1943 canvas entitled Castle Towers Garibaldi Park reproduced page 103 and listed page 282 Provenance:Acquired directly from the Artist By descent to the present Private Collection, Vancouver Exhibited:Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape / A Retrospective Exhibition, 1981, traveling in 1981 - 1982 to the Art Gallery of Windsor, The Edmonton Art Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery, the related 1943 canvas entitled Castle Towers Garibaldi Park, catalogue #30 Jock Macdonald taught at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts until 1933, when he and Group of Seven painter Frederick Varley formed the British Columbia College of Arts. Both artists painted together at Garibaldi in 1929 and 1934. After their school closed, Macdonald spent several years living simply at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, before returning to Vancouver in 1936 to teach and paint. For the next decade, before turning to abstraction, the landscape would dominate his work. In the early 1940s Lawren Harris moved to Vancouver, and Macdonald and Harris went on sketching trips together and exchanged ideas about the Transcendental movement and theories from the leading proponents of spiritualism. Macdonald spent the summers of 1942 and 1943 in Garibaldi Park, and the effect of these influences can be seen in stunning works such as this, in which the formal and spiritual merge in the magnificent mountain forms and glowing light. Macdonald exclaimed that the nearby Sphinx Glacier "was the most powerful force I have ever seen outside the mountainous waters of the open Pacific", and here found a cosmic oneness with nature.