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Ernest J. Hutchins |
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historical
d.1914
active 1900-14
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Cabin in the Rockies (Roger's Pass ?),
pre-1914
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| Mainly active in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Ernest Hutchins was a
naïve landscape painter. Although
he was self-taught, Hutchins’s work shows evidence of his interest in
the picturesque and even the sublime.
His attempts to depict the immensity of the landscape through a
comparison with the relative diminutive stature of human activity in that
landscape testifies to his fascination with the grandeur and scale of the
Rocky Mountains. His exposure
to these 19th C. artistic traditions in the early part of the
20th C. perchance attests to the delayed dissemination of such
concepts in the “new country.” More
likely, it indicates the contemporary tendency in Canadian art practice to
uphold the technique of the Academy rather than adopt new means of
communications professed by the European Avant-garde.
Such revolutionary techniques were later adopted and claimed by
members of the Group of Seven.
He worked with watercolour, ink and pencil, and oils.
His subjects include demolished buildings such as forts (Fort
Garry), vanished urban views, the prairie landscape, and the Rocky
Mountains of Alberta and British Columbia.
His work is included in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum.
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