The view depicted in the painting would certainly be Lac Kingsmere in Gatineau Park, just north of Ottawa. Goodridge Roberts spent the summer of 1932 on a property belonging to H. O. McCurry, a central figure in Canada’s early national art institutions. He served as Assistant Director of the National Gallery of Canada under Eric Brown and was deeply involved in building the Gallery’s collection and fostering relationships with Canadian artists during the 1920s and 1930s.

McCurry owned the property at Kingsmere, on the eastern shore of the lake where he frequently hosted artists. In 1932 he allowed the young Goodridge Roberts to stay and paint on the property—reportedly living in a tent for part of the summer.

Many of Roberts’ landscape studies from the summer of ‘32 describe the gently indented shoreline, low rocky islets, and mixed forest characteristic of Kingsmere. The motif of a narrow path descending to a small cove with scattered rocks and a tree in the foreground corresponds closely to the lakeside terrain around McCurry’s property.

Painting in oils directly from nature and with a new confidence, Roberts produced a series of fresh, rapidly executed studies that marked his emergence as a distinctive modern voice in Canadian painting. This landscape belongs to a formative period of intense outdoor painting and experimentation that directly preceded his first solo exhibition later in 1932 at the Arts Club in Montreal.

The location is identifiable because in the retrospective exhibition of 1969 - 1970 there is a watercolour which relates very very closely to this painting.

Goodridge Roberts was an important modern Canadian artist who was instrumental in the transition away from a nationalist art. A war artist for Canada, a teacher at the Art Association of Montreal, one of Canada’s first participants in the Venice Biennale in 1952 (along with Alfred Pellan, David Milne and Emily Carr), and artist in residence at Queen’s University. In 1969, Goodridge Roberts was honored with the extraordinary distinction of the day to be celebrated with a retrospective exhibition during his lifetime at the National Gallery of Canada and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

From 1944 - 1957 Roberts had a contract with Montreal’s Dominion Gallery for an exclusivity as a gallery in selling his works. With the quality of painting Roberts was providing Dominion and the astute marketing strategies of Dr. Stern, over the years, his paintings did develop a growing demand. By 1957, when Roberts was unsuccessful in an attempt to negotiate with Dr. Stern an acceptable increase in his guaranteed annual income, the exclusivity was terminated and numerous other art dealing galleries, including Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, vied to show Roberts’ work. The important contribution Roberts’ work made to the canon of Canadian art culminated in a Retrospective Exhibition circulated by the National Gallery of Canada 1969- 70. In 1998, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection hosted a retrospective for the benefit of a new generation of museum goers.

His paintings are represented in numerous museums across Canada including the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Beaverbrook Gallery, Fredericton, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée national des beaux art du Québec.