Artist Spotlight: Anne Savage
Whether at her family’s summer home at Lake Wonish, Quebec, or in the mountains of British Columbia, Anne Savage was at ease in nature. Her landscape paintings, full of rhythm and style, are often teeming with new growth. Savage was interested in capturing the intensity of nature without any of its foreboding qualities. In a period when so many artists in Canada focused on landscapes, Savage’s paintings, characterized by confident brush strokes and a palette of jewel tones, are unique.
Anne Savage was born to a wealthy Montreal family and studied under William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal throughout the 1910s, winning a scholarship in 1915. Following the First World War, she pursued commercial art and medical illustration, which encouraged precise handling of line and understanding of form, elements that define her mature work. However, after she took a position teaching art at Baron Byng High School in Montreal in 1922, her time to paint became scarce and precious.
What Savage was able to accomplish artistically in her offhours and throughout the summer holidays was often more adventurous than the work of artists who painted full time. Her landscapes, particularly those painted along the Skeena River in British Columbia in 1927, are visual poetry, revealing the approach of an artist more interested in evoking mood than painstakingly recording every detail of a scene. Savage spent much of her youth and most of her summers at Lake Wonish. Being at home among the hills, mountains, and lakes northwest of Montreal bred a familiarity with subtleties of colour and qualities of light that she translated into her paintings.
Of the Quebec landscape Savage once said, “The land rolls away in great sweeping folds and the forms run in long laps right up from the sea, field after field. It is like a patchwork quilt…. But the difficult, the terribly hard thing to do, is make up your mind what to paint.” It seems, though, that wherever she planted her easel, she found a worthwhile composition—a boggy swamp, a screen of bare trees, an abandoned plow. Through her art, Savage added dimension and lyricism to the Canadian landscape tradition and is now being fully recognized for the excellence of her work.
Temlaham, Upper Skeena River
1927
In 1927, Anne Savage travelled to British Columbia as a guest of A.Y. Jackson (the sculptor Florence Wyle was also on the trip) in an initiative he had devised with the ethnographer Marius Barbeau to depict the “vanishing cultures” of the Indigenous people there. What she saw was something different: communities harmoniously integrated into the landscape and villages alive with everyday incident, which she presented without histrionics. While she produced a number of works depicting Gitxsan villages and their inhabitants, some of her most moving paintings record the landscape alone. Here, Savage looks out on the Skeena valley and the mountains beyond, expressing each element in broad swaths of pure colour. One feels the majesty of the magnificent river pursuing its ancient course through Gitxsan territory to the sea.
Green Shores, Laurentians
c. 1935
Anne Savage regularly stayed in her family’s summer home at Lake Wonish in the Laurentian Mountains northwest of Montreal. From here she painted countless stirring landscapes of the dramatic hills and lakes of rural Quebec. This work is typical of the sunny style she practised in the mid-1930s and is painted using smooth brushwork, a bright palette, and a stylized, almost geometric, composition.
Untitled (Laurentians)
mid-to- late-1930s
Untitled (Laurentians) is a signature late-1930s painting on panel by Savage, depicting the rolling hills and dense forests around the artist’s summer home. The foreground of the painting features a tree with wispy interior branches, a signature style of the artist’s, and a ramshackle fence that zigzags alongside a path. This painting is somewhat unique for Savage, highlighting the density of the wilderness in abstracted triangular shapes, perhaps responding to the growing trend for abstraction in 1930s Montreal led by Marian Dale Scott and Fritz Brandtner, among others. The background of the work opens with a beautiful sweep of clouded sky and the dramatic outline of the Laurentian hills.
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