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After my biography of David Milne (1881–1953), Painting Place: The Life and Work of David B. Milne, was published in 1996, and just after David B. Milne: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings was launched in 1998, a crucial fact about Milne came to light. I've been sitting on it for the past decade and a half, partly having been distracted by other interests and activities, partly believing that it wouldn't change fundamental things, partly being uneasy about not having revealed immediately a truth that is pertinent, and partly being uncertain how to present it. Many large projects – and the Milne Project was one – are expected to produce supplements or updates, since continuing studies by original researchers or others often turf up new facts or material, but a Milne supplement was never considered, even though several works by him have surfaced in the interim. The shock came in a letter I received from James T. Angus, who, as a young boy, knew David Milne when Milne lived alone in a tiny cabin at Six Mile Lake in southern Muskoka from 1933 to 1939. The Angus family lived at Big Chute, a few miles away. Big Chute was the site of one of the proposed locks on the Trent-Severn river system that connected the Severn River to Georgian Bay. The lock was never built, however, but to make the waterway functional, a short rail device, managed by James's father Scotty Angus during the summers, moved boats around the otherwise impassable rapid.

This comprehensive survey of the life and work of the Canadian artist David Milne (1882-1953) accompanies the first UK exhibition of Milne's work at Dulwich Picture Gallery and brings together one hundred and twenty of his most significant works in oil, watercolour and dry-point printmaking. Like the members of the Group of Seven, Milne primarily chose landscape as his subject matter. However, his true subject was the process of perception and representation, reducing his painting to its essentials and infusing it with his own distinctive modern sensibility. Through the use of photographs, archival material and Milne's own writings the book presents a moving account of one man's spiritual and emotional voyage into modernity - from his early life in small town Ontario, to the bustling sidewalks of New York, on to the war torn landscapes of northern France as an official war artist and back again to the woods, lakes and fields of upstate New York. Pivoting as it does on Milne's war art, which includes some of the most formally daring of his career, the publication will serve as a poignant locus of remembrance, underscoring the historic bond between Canada and Great Britain, and offering a unique perspective on history through the eyes of one of Canada's most sophisticated modern painters.

BORN IN 1882, David Milne was the youngest often children. For his first few years, the family lived in a log cabin near Burgoyne before moving into the nearby village of Paisley. This area was settled by Scottish immigrants like his parents. Milne was proud of his ancestors' closeness to the soil and doubtless helped his father, who worked on a farm. Milne used to walk to the top of the hill behind the cabin and look down over the hills, fields, and woods that roll away like waves toward Lake Huron. He later wrote that this view brought him \"face to face with infinity where anything might be and anything might happen.\"1 This natural landscape was to remain Milne's touchstone throughout life: again and again he settled in areas that recalled Bruce County, and built cabins in which he simulated a pioneer lifestyle. He was deeply impressed by the ideas of American Transcendentalists such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, and he shared their view of nature as a vehicle for spiritual transcendence. Milne maintained that \"heaven is not far away and shadowy and unreal, but here, now, and very real,\" and he argued that \"we build our own small heavens in our own small gardens or on our own thin canvas, we accept the imperfect world around us, we must, but within it we build our own perfect world.\"2 He later wrote: \"art is a way of life that in the very highest sense is a 'labor to the glory of God.' \"3 Selfless and unworldly, he was drawn irresistibly to a solitary and simple life close to nature, and he had a deep need to devote his time exclusively to contemplation and painting. The one book he always had with him was the Bible. MILNE had an excellent education in Paisley and Walkerton, and access to their outstanding Mechanics Institute libraries. He would have read articles about \"the new New York\" in the leading American periodicals to which the Paisley library subscribed. He made the monumental decision to go to that city in 1903 to study commercial art, and was soon exposed to the historical collections of the Metropolitan Museum and to the contemporary art of commercial galleries. Milne was bowled over by Monet's Haystacks at the Durand-Ruel Gallery and always credited Monet with exercising the most important influence on his early work. Arriving in New York shortly after the death of America's most famous expatriate artist, James McNeill Whistler, Milne read Whistler's \"Ten O'clock Lecture,\" which became his aesthetic bible, and studied his etchings at the Lennox Library.

Devoted to his exacting medium -- at the time regarded as inferior to oil painting -- [David Milne] focused mainly on aesthetic matters, among them color, line and light. Unlike the acclaimed American watercolorist John Marin (1870-1953), whose style was influenced by Cezanne and Futurism, Milne more or less ignored the siren song of 20th-century Paris, claiming Monet as his prime influence, and then only in his early years. (Later, he, too, learned from Cezanne, particularly the compositional usefulness of paper left unpainted.) In May 1916, Milne and his first wife escaped from the city to Boston Corners, a rural New York hamlet some 100 miles north, where the local landscape presented many opportunities. One brilliant result was ''Bishop's Pond'' (1916), which depicts reflections of snowy trees, still in autumn leaf, in a clear body of water. Made by the unorthodox technique of sketching the image in pigment on dry paper, then washing over the reflections with clear water to soften their shapes, it is the first in a series of reflection studies at the pond done from seasonal points of view. They are among Milne's most dazzling works. ''Fifth Avenue, Easter Sunday,'' a 1912 work by David Milne. (Photo by Private Collection); David Milne's ''Dreamland Tower, Coney Island,'' from 1912, captures both the Beacon Tower, with its 45,000 light bulbs, and the Ferris wheel that stood at one of the four amusement parks at Coney Island. (Photo by The British Museum, London)

Wylie reviews The Life of David Milne by James King. To write a straightforward, traditional biography of Canadian artist David Milne (1881–1953) seems an odd task to undertake, as there are already several excellent publications in print on this painter and his work. This was my first thought on reading about this new book, but then, I surmised, perhaps a small, portable book on Milne, one written for the every-person, might be a really good idea. However, a basic challenge for a would-be Milne biographer is that David Milne did not really have much of a “life,” but devoted himself completely to his art. So unless one were able to write well about his work, there would be little point to a biography. As King points out in his preface, David Milne is an excellent example of an artist’s artist. I would add that Milne’s work is demanding and difficult, and one begins to appreciate it only after some hefty doses of study – both of writings on art and paintings. It is not generally work that has mass appeal. If this makes Milne sound like an elitist artist whose work is accessible only to art experts, well … there may be no way around that estimation. King does not state what his goal was in writing this book, nor whom he hoped his audience for it would be. He does not inform the reader whether he unearthed any new information about the artist, nor whether any points he makes are new thoughts of his own. He only rarely refers to previous texts on the artist in his own writing, although in his acknowledgments he credits several previous writers on Milne as having been important to him in his research.

Well, I find it irritating, anyhow. I suppose \"toward the light\" means something like \"towards a greater and greater transparency of understanding generated from within the numinousness of light's veiling down upon nature.\" The phrase may be, in fact, Milne's (though I couldn't find it). As a trope, though it smacks of that sentimental, crowd-pleasing curatorial/ PR touch, it is consistent with the kind of transcendentally soaked language Milne enjoyed from his reading of writers like Emerson and Thoreau (such as his statement about the landscapes bringing him \"face to face with infinity where anything might be and anything might happen\"). This was found in AGO curator Katharine Lochnan's press-kit essay. Be that as it may, the exhibition is more real, and thus more enjoyable, than its title. It's a big survey. There are 79 works in it (along with Milne-relevant artefacts and, rather oddly, a \"reconstructed corner of Milne's last cabin on Baptiste Lake, Ontario, that reflects his preference for [sic] simple lifestyle close to nature\"), culled from the holdings of the AGO, the British Museum (which, along with New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art, had mounted the exhibition last year), the Museum of Modern Art, the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Museum London, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Milne family, and from private collectors. Milnes watercolours were always finer than his oil paintings, and this exhibition is a more valorizing look at Milne than it would have been in full-tilt retrospective mode, with his oil paintings blaring away, sinking under their own weight. Carol Troyen, in her essay in the AGO catalogue titled \"A Welcome and Refreshing Note, Milne and the New York Scene, 1903-13,\" cites the artist as proclaiming that \"[Watercolour] is so direct, so powerful, even brutal... it should be the painting medium because it is faster, and painting is the instantanous art.\" I love the characterizing of watercolour as a \"brutal\" medium. Milne sounds here like a homespun futurist.

Boudreau reviews I Spy With My Little Eye. Hockey written by Matt Napier and illustrated by David Milne.

Lennon reviews David Milne: An Introduction to His Life and Art by David P. Silcox.

[David Milne] long recalled the silence that served as the backdrop to his days in the fields of France and Belgium, a stillness punctuated only by the occasional unexpected detonation of found munitions, the distant bugle calls at ad hoc field burials or the murmured marching chant of a troop of German prisoners of war being escorted between detainee camps. One wonders how this interlude haunted his later life, perhaps serving as a remembered counterpoint to the tranquility of Bishop's Pond near Boston Corners, where Milne returned after the war. Here he would make his celebrated series of mystical, wet-into-wet mineral-toned watercolours of still water edged in trees, pictures that offer sanctuary from mankind's modern fall from grace. Other paintings, like his studies of an abandoned iron mine atTemagami, made a decade later, feel like flashbacks, willfully awkward and chaotic compositions that reveal the clumsy hand of man wielding force where nature alone had once prevailed. \"The man changes,\" Milne once said, describing his struggle to get down on paper his experience of those ravaged battlefields and ruined architectural remains, \"and with that, the painting.\" How could it be otherwise? *