Harvest Festival

Provenance:
Pickering College, Newmarket, Ontario

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Private Collection, Montreal

Exhibitions:
Sir George Williams University, Montreal, Carl Schaefer Retrospective Exhibition: Paintings from 1926 - 1969, traveling exhibition, 1969, catalogue #35

Literature:
Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting, 1973, page 178
Notes:
Throughout the 1930s, Schaefer's production centred on a series of powerfully evocative landscapes that engaged the themes and images of his farm heritage. From 1932 to 1939 Schaefer spent large stretches of time at his family home in Hanover, Ontario. There, he created some of his most celebrated and memorable works, haunting scenes of vast, expansive fields that described the artist's very personal relationship to the land and made reference, in a larger sense, to the universal cycle of life. Dennis Reid writes: "By the depression Schaefer was raising a family and able to find employment only as a part-time teacher, and so to save money, every summer and winter holiday break from 1932 through 1939 he and his family lived with his grandparents back in Hanover. It was a period of reaffirmation of traditional values and of assertive creativity, resulting in a long series of stunning canvases."

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Harvest Festival, a richly colourful still life, corresponds chronologically to Schaefer's series of field paintings. And while it differs in subject from the landscape emphasis of the period, it shares an underlying concern with a thematic focus on the relationship between nature and family life and serves as a marvellous pictorial synthesis of Schaefer's concerns. A lace-covered window in the background leads our eye through to what is essentially a visual excerpt of the artist's large landscape paintings. Inside, beneath the window, a splendid arrangement of the fruits of a harvest is laid out, a celebratory expression of thanksgiving and home.