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492 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 in it. In fact, the book should be read as a polemic and not as a treatise. Never mind the shaky arguments and the dubious evidence. The author's approach is original and invigorating, buttressed by incisive criticisms of some fashionable views and backed by a wide and deep knowledge of the visual arts and their history. It is a book to be taken to heart. (FRANCIS SPARsHorr) ).E.H. Macdonald. J.E.H. MacDonald Sketchbook, '9'5-'922, a facsimile edition. Introduction by Hunter Bishop Penumbra Press '979. No pagination. $9.95 paper Thoreau MacDonald. Notebooks. Foreword by Ray Nash. 'Note on the Text' by John Flood Penumbra Press '!)Bo. 21B. $14.95 paper 0.). Firestone. The Other A.Y. Jackson: A Memoir McClelland and Stewart '979. $lB·95 All of the three books under review could be described as annotations on the achievements of important and prolific careers, whether by the artists themselves (in the form of sketches, writings, or comments recorded by interlocutors), or by those documentinl( their doings and sayings. Yet only lately has such vital information been treated with any significant degree of scholarly respect. John Flood, in his 'Note on the Text' of Thoreau MacDonald's Notebooks, remarks that MacDonald called 'the preliminary drawings' made for book illustrations 'notes,' and from them he worked up his final line drawings. The selection presented by Penumbra Press includes both finished ink drawings and the more immediate pencil and wash sketches. These are interspersed as vignettes among extracts from correspondence and journal entries, including the Go Home Bay 'notebook' that the young naturalist pencilled in 1912. This charming fragment recounts a summer holiday spent at Dr James MacCallum's Georgian Bay cottage, where the elder MacDonald produced such landmark canvases as Fine Weather, Georgian Bay, and View from Split Rock. Early Georgian Bay island-scapes are finely reproduced in another Penumbra publication, J.E.H. MacDonald Sketchbook, '9'5-'922, a facsimile edition of the sketchbook acquired by the National Gallery of Canada in '977. J.E.H. MacDonald evidently placed a high practical value on his numerous visual diaries; several are mentioned in Hunter Bishop's introduction to this volume. J.E.H. MacDonald's sketchbooks and notebooks served him as indispensable records of ideas and images for future development or simply as jotted impressions of places and things. HUMANITIES 493 However, he would never have considered selling- much less publishing - these testaments to his continuingadherence to the motto of the Toronto Art (Students') League: Nulla dies sine linea. Of the hard-working artist-illustrators of J.E.H. MacDonald's generation and its precursors, Bishop notes that 'only an infinitesimal number have ever had an edition of one of their sketchbooks reproduced in book form.' Such facsimiles will appear, one trusts, as a result of 'the interest now being expressed in the perusal and acquisition of their sketchbooks, notebooks, diaries, letters, photographs and memorabilia.' J.E.H. MacDonald's Group of Seven colleague A.Y. Jackson treated sketches merely as pictorial memoranda unworthy of notice, and O.J. Firestone informs us in his memoir of Jackson that it was not until the 1960s that he agreed to sell his drawings. Their marketability was enhanced by the appearance in 1968 of Naomi Jackson Groves's A. Y.'s Canada, a collection of her uncle's annotated on-site pencil sketches. An image in the J.E.H. MacDonald sketchbook draws together all three artists represented in the volumes under review: a typically fleet yet subtle drawing entitled, in the artist's hand, 'Moonlight/Georgian Bay Islands,' which his son Thoreau MacDonald has authenticated in the margin as 'Looking West from Dr. McCallum's [sic] Island/toward Split Rock Is. Go Home Bay area.' One of the major oils of Jackson's last productive period, Pickerel Weed, Split Rock Island, Georgian Bay, dated 1965, is almost identical in composition to J.E.H. MacDonald's sketch dIf fifty years before. From graphic and written evidence it is clear that J.E.H. MacDonald had the most agile and inquisitive mind of all the members ofthe Group of Seven. His 1915-22 sketchbook...

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