The Collection of Mitzi & Mel Dobrin by Alan Klinkhoff Gallery

'There is a wonderful stillness and maturity in this superb sketch, painted in the spring before Thomson’s premature death in the summer of 1917.' -Charles C. Hill Tom Thomson’s oil sketches were almost all painted in front of the motif and worked up into canvases during the winter in Toronto. The change of scale between the small sketch and large canvas posed new challenges and as sketches fed his canvases, the painting of the canvases also brought changes to his sketches. A new formality first...

Frank Johnston got his real start as an artist when he worked at Grip Limited in Toronto in 1911. At this lively, highly competitive commercial art firm, he met future Group of Seven members J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, and Franklin Carmichael. There is no record of his meeting Tom Thomson but both were at Grip at the same time. Likely they spoke or, at least, had a nodding acquaintance. Doubtless, Johnston would have watched Thomson go on his painting trips (which began in 1912) with...