Following text from the court order sale at Toronto’s Heffel Gallery
PROVENANCE
Collection of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Canada
LITERATURE
The Beaver, December 1929, reproduced front cover
Hudson’s Bay Company, Company Calendar, 1930, reproduced
Peter C. Newman, Empire of the Bay: An Illustrated History of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1989, reproduced page 151
Andrea M. Paci, “Picture This: Hudson’s Bay Company Calendar Images and Their Documentary Legacy, 1913 – 1970,” master’s thesis, University of Manitoba / University of Winnipeg, 2000, listed page 123 and reproduced page 131
EXHIBITED
Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Walter J. Phillips: “Water & Woods,” February 12 – June 5, 2011
The York boat was a vessel used by the Hudson’s Bay Company to carry cargo through the inland lakes and waterways of Rupert’s Land, trading the lightness of a birchbark canoe for the size and durability of a full-sized wooden hull. Named after the HBC’s headquarters of York Factory on Hudson Bay and typically piloted by Métis boatmen, the York boat was fast and efficient, propelling up to six tonnes of cargo by either oars or, on open water, a square sail that doubled as a tent at camp. By the 1920s, in the face of steamships and rail lines, the boats fell out of favour, though the Norway House Cree Nation still holds boat races at the Treaty and York Boat Days festival every August. Walter J. Phillips here renders the boats in brilliant colours as they ripple through the glassy lake. He would return to the subject in a dramatic form a few years later with his stormy York Boat on Lake Winnipeg (1931), one of the artist’s most celebrated woodcut prints.
