Baptiste Lake is in the Bancroft area, just over 200 km northeast of Toronto. Frequently on the move throughout his life, often because of impecuniousness but also in search of new painting places, Milne scouted and then moved to this lake in the later 1940s. A skilled carpenter, he built a still-extent cabin in 1949. This was his studio for three years, the base for his explorations and memorable depictions of the surrounding landscape. Bancroft was a gritty and poor logging area at the time, yet the series of watercolours Milne executed there are, by contrast, ephemeral, even ethereal in their touch and mood. Milne’s outline of the gently hilly terrain rising from the lake structures Bear Camp V. Milne identified the site as Camp Makwan. The buildings and lakefront docks of the camp seem insubstantial, floating as they are in Milne’s signature washes of bright watercolour pigment. They may be abandoned camps that dotted the area and attracted Milne. Painting in February, he nonetheless revels in the hues of autumn. Milne was a keen observer of such phenomena, but he was not an en plein air painter in the sense that he insisted on transcribing just what he saw. Instead, he was an ecstatic connoisseur of natural phenomena who rendered what he recalled and thought as well as his immediate perceptual experience. Here he remembers the autumn from the perspective of winter, rendering the scene with his characteristic nervous outlining and freely flowing, saturated watercolours. Milne died at Baptiste Lake in December 1953.

Mark A. Cheetham

The Art Gallery of Ontario has prepared an informative series of videos on Milne, one of which explores Baptiste Lake through the artist’s diaries and a commentary by David Milne, Jr., who remembers living there when this picture was made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB5JzV7G1-k