Art canadien classique
Monday Morning, March 1st , 1969
Etching and aquatint
19 ⅞ x 31 ⅞ in (50.5 x 80.9 cm) [Plate]
Numbered 6 of 10
This work is presently on view at our Toronto gallery
Sold
Provenance
Private collection, MontrealExpositions
Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Black Ice: David Blackwood Prints of Newfoundland, February 5 - June 12, 2011, another impression from the same edition exhibited.
Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, David Blackwood: Myth & Legend, October 11, 2025 - July 26, 2026, another impression from the same edition exhibited.
Documentation
Farley Mowat, Wake of the Great Sealers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973), 42-43. [reproduced].
Katharine Lochnan et al., Black Ice: David Blackwood: Prints of Newfoundland (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario; Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011), pl. 8, unpaginated.
Executed in an unusually small edition of 10, plus proofs, Monday Morning, March 1st is among the scarcer prints in Blackwood’s oeuvre.
The composition appears to depict a funeral procession, with pallbearers carrying a coffin across the snowy coastal landscape. The print is remarkable for its emotional restraint and technical sophistication. The small procession is dwarfed by the immense winter landscape and the great white sheets billowing violently in the wind above it, imbuing the scene with dark sublimity. Light on the horizon suggests a rising sun, without dispelling the prevailing sense of cold, scale, and mourning. Blackwood exploits the tonal possibilities of etching and aquatint with exceptional ability: dense blacks, finely graduated greys and large expanses of pale paper create atmospheric depth, a heightened sense of solemnity and foreboding, while also evoking historical memory. The result is at once intimate and monumental. The intimate ritual of carrying a human body is set against the vast and indifferent Newfoundland landscape.
Monday Morning, March 1st is reproduced as a two-page spread in Farley Mowat’s Wake of the Great Sealers, following accounts of sealing disasters. The title may refer specifically to Monday, March 1, 1915, an important annual date in the sealing season and the first such season following the catastrophic sealing disasters of 1914 which heavily influenced Blackwood. The artist may have drawn on the visual language of mourning and the power of his technique to evoke the apprehension with which another sealing season must have begun while the losses of the previous year remained painfully fresh. In this reading, the procession embodies less a single historical event than the ever-present proximity of death in Newfoundland’s culture. Alternatively, Blackwood may have been less concerned with any specific historical episode than with bringing together the harsh realities of outport life and the symbolic importance of March 1 as the traditional threshold of Newfoundland’s sealing season.
The composition appears to depict a funeral procession, with pallbearers carrying a coffin across the snowy coastal landscape. The print is remarkable for its emotional restraint and technical sophistication. The small procession is dwarfed by the immense winter landscape and the great white sheets billowing violently in the wind above it, imbuing the scene with dark sublimity. Light on the horizon suggests a rising sun, without dispelling the prevailing sense of cold, scale, and mourning. Blackwood exploits the tonal possibilities of etching and aquatint with exceptional ability: dense blacks, finely graduated greys and large expanses of pale paper create atmospheric depth, a heightened sense of solemnity and foreboding, while also evoking historical memory. The result is at once intimate and monumental. The intimate ritual of carrying a human body is set against the vast and indifferent Newfoundland landscape.
Monday Morning, March 1st is reproduced as a two-page spread in Farley Mowat’s Wake of the Great Sealers, following accounts of sealing disasters. The title may refer specifically to Monday, March 1, 1915, an important annual date in the sealing season and the first such season following the catastrophic sealing disasters of 1914 which heavily influenced Blackwood. The artist may have drawn on the visual language of mourning and the power of his technique to evoke the apprehension with which another sealing season must have begun while the losses of the previous year remained painfully fresh. In this reading, the procession embodies less a single historical event than the ever-present proximity of death in Newfoundland’s culture. Alternatively, Blackwood may have been less concerned with any specific historical episode than with bringing together the harsh realities of outport life and the symbolic importance of March 1 as the traditional threshold of Newfoundland’s sealing season.
