Arrested Development

In 1927, Alexander Young Jackson, avid for fresh landscapes to paint, wrote the minister of the interior requesting that he and Dr. Frederick Banting, his friend and sketching partner, be allowed passage to Canada’s far north aboard the SS Boethic. The Boethic made an annual run from Nova Scotia to deliver supplies and personnel to remote RCMP posts. There was no other way to reach the Arctic.

Their voyage is described in Wayne Larsen’s A.Y. Jackson: The Life of a Landscape Painter as well as in Jackson’s lively 1958 memoir, A Painter’s Country.

Jackson told the Regina Leader-Post that he hoped to find "new art values in the far north" because the "ordinary pastoral painting, as practised now, is a dead letter."

After he returned with hundreds of sketches of icebergs, barren hills and Inuit villages, he gave an interview to the Toronto Star in which he criticized the timidity of the artists of...