"One of Banting's most important snow scenes is the sketch Cobalt, 1932..."

— Catharine Mastin, PhD¹

Cobalt, 1932 is one of the finest and most vibrant paintings by Frederick Bainting, a rare oil sketch that the artist "painted up" into a canvas (possibly his only canvas of Cobalt). In front of a row of houses of various colours, a child is pulling a toboggan up a hill (not "shovelling snow" as described in Cobalt: A Mining Town and the Canadian Imagination, 2024). The colours of the houses stand out against the fresh snow, and their helter skelter arrangement create a sense of playfulness that appears to have attracted the artist.


Frederick Banting was a physician, scientist, and artist best known for co-discovering insulin, an achievement that transformed the treatment of diabetes and earned him the Nobel Prize in 1923. Born in 1891 in Alliston, Ontario, Banting trained in medicine but maintained a lifelong interest in painting, finding in it relief from professional pressures and fame. He became acquainted with Group of Seven founding artist A.Y. Jackson in about 1926, which Jackson recalled in his autobiography, A Painter's Country: "I had met him when he called at my studio in Toronto and asked to see some of my sketches…I found him very shy and very modest. He had dabbled a little bit in painting when he set up practice in London, Ontario, after the war, while he was waiting for patients; now he had started to paint again and he appreciated the advice. When I told him that I was planning to spend some part of the winter in St. Jean Port Joli, he asked if he might come along with me."²


After that, Banting and Jackson became regular sketching companions. The artists may have chosen to paint Cobalt after seeing Yvonne McKague Housser's important canvas, Cobalt (1931) in the final Group of Seven Exhibition in 1931 (Mastin). Banting arrived in late September, and Jackson a week later on October 3rd. According to Mastin, citing a letter from Jackson, snow arrived around mid-October, dating our sketch more specifically.


Cobalt and the surrounding areas had contained some of the world's richest silver deposits, in addition to deposits of cobalt, ore, and nickel. When Jackson and Banting arrived in 1932 the town was well into its decline caused by the exhaustion of these resources. However its structures and vertical terrain provided the artists with stimulating opportunities to paint new northern subjects.

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Footnotes:


1. Catharine Mastin, Cobalt: A Mining Town and the Canadian Imagination(Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2024), 115 [reproduced].
2. A.Y. Jackson, A Painter's Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson(Toronto, Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, 1976) 75.