The Red Maple

Painted in A.Y. Jackson's Toronto studio in November 1914, this landscape is based on a sketch from nature produced along the Oxtongue River in Algonquin Park. With its foreground screen of fragile young branches and fluttering red leaves set against a background of churning rapids, this composition captures a distinctive natural phenomenon in Canada, and one symbolic of budding nationalist sentiments, which the outbreak of war a few months earlier had made more acute.