Snow Patches, Boston Corners, NY

Provenance:
Douglas Duncan Picture Loan Society, Toronto

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J.S. McLean, Toronto, 1954

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By descent to the daughter of the above, Vancouver

Exhibitions:
Possibly Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 113th Annual Exhibition, Philadelphia, February 3 - March 24, 1918, catalogue #266

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By the time that David Milne decided to leave New York in 1915, he had spent over a decade in the city. While he had received some critical acclaim, he was unable to make a living as an artist and was unhappy trying to balance a career as a commercial artist with that of a fine artist. He decided to leave New York and find a location, while within easy commuting distance of New York (even then an important centre for exhibiting and selling his work), which would be relatively inexpensive to live in and might allow him to devote himself to his work as an artist rather than trying to make a living in the commercial field. He and his friend James Clarke, who was an important early supporter of Milne and his work, scouted out a variety of areas before deciding on Boston Corners in upper New York State (close to the boundary with Connecticut and Massachusetts). The move prov

Literature:
113th Annual Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1918, listed as Painting Made at Boston Corners No.1 page 41

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Milne Family Papers, "Autobiography", 1947

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Peter Hastings Falk, The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Volume 3, 1914 - 1968, catalogue #266, page 330

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Ian Thom et al, David Milne, essay by Megan Bice, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1991, page 114

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David P. Silcox, Painting Place, The Life and Work of David B. Milne, 1996, pages 68, 71, 75 and 86

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David Milne Jr. and David P. Silcox, David B. Milne: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume 1: 1882 - 1928, 1998, reproduced page 191, catalogue #107.120
Notes:
Milne and his first wife, Patsy, settled in Boston Corners in May of 1916. We are fortunate that he recorded some of his thoughts about Boston Corners in his 1947 "Autobiography" which remains in the Milne Family Papers. Of the small village he wrote, "It was more like finding a star or an element. Certain facts about it were known beforehand, or at least required. It had to be within reasonable distance of New York, yet beyond commuting range and it had to be suitable for painting, preferably with hills to sit on while painting other hills. If there were interesting things between the hills, such as a village or lakes or ponds, so much the better." He went on to describe Corners as "a string of coloured beads, with one end dangling into the cut that held the two railways, one road and one stream and was just wide enough to hold them. First, nearest the mountains, was the church, small, white, with a belfry. Across the road, a long gray house.Then the red school." The architectural "beads" were to become important elements in many of Milne's Boston Corners landscapes.

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The Milnes were able to rent a relatively inexpensive house, the so-called Under Mountain House, and David began to explore the area for painting subjects. He wrote, "Painting subjects were scattered all over the place but rarely were more than two miles away. All were painted on the spot, and then, good or bad, left alone; no attempt was made to develop or change or repaint after the original painting was done. I had to carry a wooden paint box, easel, stretched watercolour paper or canvas and, when I went to the limit of my painting territory, my lunch, cold tea or coffee in a jar, sandwiches, cake if it was to be had, even pie, when there was pie." The works produced in Boston Corners are, therefore, the records of direct study of his subjects and their remarkable accomplishment clearly demonstrate Milne's rapidly growing strengths as an artist.

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By the time Milne produced Snow Patches in 1917, he was very familiar with the subject matter. The "beads" had already appeared in a number of watercolours and canvases but this work is one of the most accomplished of his Boston Corners works. We clearly see the white church with its belfry on the left side of the composition, and Milne has carefully placed colour accents through the buildings to lead us through the central part of the space. The work also exploits his love of the outlined trees with solid colours of foliage between the branches, and on the distant hillside he uses a series of textured and flat areas of paint to define the topography of the form. These elements are at once immediately recognizable and on the edge of abstract pattern. His use of colour is also important, and in addition to the white of snow patches, the predominant brown is an important element, as are the colours blue and green. It is clearly not a realistic depiction of the scene and yet it is one of enormous confidence and visual power.

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Milne uses his love of line and pattern judiciously and to great effect. Look, for example, at the row of five trees which define the foreground of the painting. Each is treated entirely differently and yet each is, in its own way, completely believable. The space as a whole is carefully developed through the use of four distinct bands within the composition - the foreground screen of trees, the middle ground with the brightly coloured buildings which form a strongly diagonal movement linking us to the distant hills, the hillside in the background, and above it all a thin strip of white coloured sky. The eye explores the composition in a variety of ways and, as in all of Milne's best work, there are areas of rest and areas of greater visual interest - what he called "compression." The "interesting things between the hills" have allowed him to produce a composition which is immediately arresting but which deeply rewards our continued looking. As he wrote, "Painting is the lightning art, the impact from a picture may be received at one glance. But.it is not instantaneous. Time does enter in and there is always a progress through a picture."