McMichael Announces the Acquisition
of a Morrice Painting
8 December, 2005 Kleinburg, ON…The McMichael Canadian Art Foundation and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection are pleased to announce the acquisition in memory of our co-founder, Robert McMichael, of a major canvas, Sailing Boats, c.1905-1907 by James Wilson Morrice.
Michael Johnston, Chair of the McMichael Canadian Art Foundation, said: “This wonderful addition to the McMichael’s permanent collection has been made possible by a significant bequest from Mr. McMichael. The Robert McMichael Memorial Art Fund was established in 2003 to support the ongoing acquisition of Canadian art by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection; we are most pleased to have acquired this painting for the gallery’s permanent collection.”
About the Painting
This painting was represented in a collection of 46 glass slides which were discovered among a group of photographs of Morrice paintings taken in Paris during the artist’s lifetime by the firm of Crevaux. These plates were acquired by Buchanan in the 1930s and are now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Morrice is known to have exhibited extensively in France and Germany and, according to Buchanan, many works are “almost certainly somewhere in European collections, and they may eventually turn up in auction sales.”
Buchanan described the work in his catalogue raisonné in James Wilson Morrice, A Biography (1936, p.166) as follows:
A jetty to the left in the foreground; elsewhere a wide expanse of water, and, in the centre, two sailing boats, with pointed sails, close together. The edge of another boat appears at the extreme left of the canvas. A distant shoreline in the left background. Signed.
The work came to the Joyner Waddington’s Canadian Fine Art auction galleries from a private collection in Karlsruhe, Germany. It will be on public display at the McMichael gallery on the evening of December 8, 2006.
For further information, please contact Joan Murray, Interim Executive Director and CEO, McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Ms. Murray will be pleased to speak with you and may be contacted at 905-903-1121, ext. 2245.
For further information and/or jpgs:
Stephen Weir, Publicist
Gallery: (905) 893-1121 ext. 2529
Toronto Office: (416) 489-5868
Cell: (416) 801-3101
s1weir@aol.com or sweir5492@rogers.com
