David Milne
David Brown Milne (1882-1953) was a Canadian painter, writer, and printmaker. His brief time living in New York City influenced his modernist style of painting and dry-point printmaking. However, the Canadian landscape proved to be his biggest source of inspiration for artistic content. His bold use of black and white paint, alongside his experimentations with the painting medium itself, produced a unique, compelling, and stark style that was distinct from the impressionist styles of the Group of Seven who were working at the same time.
He grew up in Paisley, a small town in southwestern Ontario. In 1903, at the age of 21, Milne moved to New York City to study art with the Art Students League. In 1917, five years after marrying Frances (Patsy) May, Milne left their home in Boston Corners to start basic military training in Toronto for the First World War. During his time in the military, he was asked to work as a war artist, creating paintings and drawings of the soldiers in Kinmel Park Camp, England, and on the battlefields of France and Belgium.
He returned to Boston Corners in 1919 and remained there until 1929. He then returned to Canada to create paintings in Temagami, Weston, and Palsgrave. In 1933, Milne separated from his wife and moved to Port Severn, where two of his biggest patrons Vincent and Alice Massey lived. He moved yet again to Uxbridge with his new love interest Kathleen Pavey in the late 1930s. He continued travelling to Algonquin Provincial Park and Baptiste Lake for inspiration for his artworks during the later years of his life. Milne died in Bancroft after suffering a series of small strokes between November 14, 1952, and December 26, 1953.
Milne’s paintings and prints were typically landscapes. He created dry-point prints and paintings in watercolour and oils, but he rendered his images in a less impressionistic style than the Group of Seven. Instead, his work was described as having a more ‘modernist’ style and feel. This is partly due to the influence he derived from both European and American modernists and his drive to develop a distinct, expressive style of his own. He often employed black and white to add dynamism and contrast, and he experimented with oil painting techniques while exploring the use of line, composition, texture, and colour.
When he was gifted an etching press in 1926, Milne developed a technique for coloured dry-point printing that innovated the black and white techniques he had learned while studying with the Art Students League. The result was a print that looks tiny, layered, and compelling. Near the end of his career, Milne also began experimenting with the content of his work. He went from depicting simple landscapes that primarily focused on the medium of painting, rather than accurate representations, to depicting interpretations of allegorical content.
Milne’s work has been exhibited in many shows worldwide, including at the National Gallery of Canada, the British Museum, the Venice Biennale, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two major exhibitions of his work include a retrospective held at Hart House in Toronto from 1955-1956 and a solo show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, England, in 2018.