A. Y. Jackson made his first trip to the north shore of Lake Superior in autumn 1921, when he accompanied fellow Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris to Rossport, Ontario. While the area had greater impact on Harris’s art in the 1920s, it was Jackson who would return repeatedly later in life. In 1955 Jackson made a significant change in his life. He moved from the Studio Building, Toronto, where he had been living since 1913 (when Harris and Dr James M. MacCallum financed its construction), to a new studio-home in Manotick, Ontario, near family. That August, he also bought property at Twidale Bay on Lake Superior, near Wawa, Ontario. Four years later, in the heat of July, he painted this view of a fisherman’s log cabin.

With its characteristic tones of pink, purple and cobalt blue, Jackson’s sketch marks decades of devotion to painting Canadian landscape outdoors. His identity is forever entwined in Canadian art history with the Group of Seven. More than any other member, he took to heart the Group’s myth-making land-based nationalism. His long-held belief in a distinctively Canadian art culminated in his autobiographical tome “A Painter’s Country” (1958), and his extensive body of landscapes served as tribute to his nationalistic outlook.