Sleigh, Moonlight, circa 1908

Private Collection, Toronto
Sotheby's, auction, Toronto, 2 December 1998, lot 188
Private Collection, Toronto

Margaret Fairbairn, "Five Canadian Artists Gain Distinctions", Toronto Star Weekly, 8 March 1913

J.E.H. MacDonald began his career as a graphic designer at Grip Limited in Toronto before moving to London, England, in 1903 to work for Carlton Studios, a design firm established by former members of the Toronto Art League. He returned to Grip in 1907, where he met Albert Robson, Tom Thomson, Frank H. Johnston, and Arthur Lismer. The artists were encouraged to sketch on weekends in the countryside surrounding Toronto, and MacDonald soon began exhibiting his landscapes in the annual exhibitions of various societies. MacDonald’s artistic development was noted by Margaret Fairbairn in the Toronto Star Weekly: "When Mr. J.E.H. MacDonald, A.R.C.A. of Toronto first exhibited, his subjects were invariably low-toned effects of night, moonlight on snow or twilight and they attracted the attention of knowing ones by their discriminating appreciation of tone. They were little harmonies and symphonies. The canvases were small, but the feeling shown was not. His choice of these subjects, he avers, was not because of any decided predilection for them, but because he happened to have more and better opportunities to study the nuances of twilight, of night, than anything else. Of late he has been experimenting with the atmospheric effects of dazzling sun and snow, an added impetus being the wonderful paintings of a Scandinavian artist shown at Buffalo."

This gouache may be a study for Winter Moonlight, 1908, exhibited at the Ontario Society of Artists that year.