Inner Places: The Life of David Milne

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Preface

David Milne is one of Canada’s finest artists, but in many ways he remains, sixty years after his death, an isolated figure. His pictures are usually not quite as bright as, say, many of the masterpieces by the members of the Group of Seven. Unlike them, he did not link his work with his country’s national destiny. In fact, he lived much of his adult life outside his native land. He was, for long periods of time, a quasi-recluse.

Milne was also the artist as intellectual, someone who wrote about his aesthetic practice in considerable detail. In this sense, he is regarded, quite rightly, as an artist’s artist. And yet few painters have been so thoroughly grounded in the strong, intense feelings that an artist can derive from his work — and he wanted his viewers to experience those emotions.

For Milne, creating art was his life. Once he determined to devote his life to becoming an artist, that unfolding process dominated his existence. Put a slightly different way, his life was his art. Milne sacrificed material comfort for the thrill or kick of creating art. He is the embodiment of the notion of an artist whose life is devoted to art for art’s sake.

This biography is about the emotional and professional life of a man who took enormous pleasure in making art. From the outside, at first glance, Milne’s life may not seem exciting, but in fact his quest was an exhilarating one in which he battled, heroically, to conquer all kinds of adversity to snare the perfect image. That search is the stuff of legend.

* * *

Who was David Milne? He was born in rural Ontario in 1881[1] and trained as an artist at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1912 he married Patsy Hegarty and moved to Boston Corners in upstate New York. He volunteered to serve in the Canadian army during the First World War and worked as a war artist in England, France, and Belgium. He returned to Boston Corners in 1919 and lived in a variety of places in the surrounding areas. He returned to Canada in 1929 and painted in Temagami, Weston, and Palgrave, Ontario. He separated from his wife in 1933 and moved to Six Mile Lake. In 1938 he met his second wife, Kathleen Pavey. Their son, David, was born in 1941. In the later years of his career, he painted in Toronto, Uxbridge, Baptiste Lake, and Bancroft, where he died on December 26, 1953. Milne is best known as a landscape painter, but he was also particularly adept at still lifes (especially of flowers), interior views of rooms, and, late in his career, subject pictures.

In one attempt to define himself, Milne wrote: I have the broad, short fingers of the peasant. I have too the taste for few and simple things, extending to an almost abnormal dislike for, and impatience with, possessions that are more than bare necessities. I like to think that my leaning toward simplicity in art is a translation of hereditary thrift, of stinginess into a more attractive medium.[2]

David Milne, the man who reduced life to essentials, found happiness in nature: on a bright day you go outside and stand for a moment. A load falls from your shoulders. You feel thrilled, uplifted, serene, content, stimulated — why?[3] Trying to answer that difficult question was a pursuit to which he devoted his life.

An artist like himself, Milne believed, obtained an impression from some phase of nature. Having gained the impression, he did not attempt to reproduce the scene before his eyes. Rather, he had to discover what stirred him and to translate it into an arrangement of colour and line.[4] The artist Peter Doig has put it this way: I really like it when the reduction in [Milne’s] work becomes extreme: black mountains, black interiors, almost negatives of space.[5]

Milne idolized nature (botany was his favourite subject in high school). Its intricacies fascinated him, but he often felt that it acted like a cruel mistress who, when she wanted, could withdraw her favours. And so he assiduously courted nature. Often, he became one with nature — even in moments that elicited a moment of terror — alone in the bush on a dark night with a high wind, he became excited and pleased. When separated from the animals of the forest, he lamented, I miss my partners, a few chipmunks and birds and owls and porcupines.[6]

For Milne the landscape artist, nature was much more than mere trees, forests, mountains, and lakes. In nature, Milne saw a reflection of the divinity within himself. As an adult, he did not believe in the Presbyterian God of his childhood, but throughout his life he saw the meaning of his existence written in nature. In that sense, he was a deeply spiritual artist who distinguished between the spiritual forest and mundane trees. As a child, he was brought face to face with Infinity where anything might be and anything might happen.[7] The pursuit of infinity — the presence of the divine in nature — became a lifelong preoccupation.

Milne incorporated a wide variety of Christian symbolism in his subject pictures in the last twelve years of his life. In those images — which he never discussed in terms of their allegorical import — he revisited his early knowledge of the Bible, especially the New Testament.

In a curious way, the spiritual import of his early, middle, and late landscapes flowed into the depiction of stories and parables that are specifically concerned with transcendence. From beginning to end, Milne was an artist spellbound by the spiritual existence at the edge of the material world. The allure of the otherworldly is a constant in his career, although that fascination took many different forms.

* * *

What is the lifeblood of David Milne’s art? What makes him a great artist? What does a David Milne look like?

To begin with, he extracted the essentials from any subject he painted. He put it this way: The thing that makes a picture is the thing that makes dynamite — compression.[8] Milne’s simplicity of line, his precise use of colour, and his adroit use of texture compel his viewers to see and experience something thrilling of which they were not previously aware. Great artists have this effect on their audiences: they change their lives.

As opposed to Lawren Harris, who thought in monumental, epic terms, David Milne is a lyrical artist, one who espouses his sensibility in small, intimate pictures.* Milne often claimed that subject matter was secondary in his image-making: he insisted he was in pursuit of the ecstasy he experienced during moments of creation. He once put it this way: his paintings and drawings had little appeal to sentiment, but were, rather, simplifications of colour and line[9] that led to moments of elation. Milne’s pursuit of such moments was integral to his sense of himself as a person.

In worldly terms, David Milne paid dearly for his commitment to a life pursued single-mindedly for art. In 1934, he asked: I have been painting for over a quarter of a century, steadily, and very, very few of the pictures done have been sold, most of them have never been exhibited, more than half have never been seen by any interested eye except my own. Have they any value?[10] This biography attempts to answer that rhetorical question.

In addition to being a prolific artist, Milne was a copious writer. He composed an autobiography. He wrote essays on a wide variety of topics. He authored countless letters. As such, he is an excellent guide to how he saw and experienced his existence.

I have not hesitated to allow Milne to speak freely in this biography. In turn funny, witty, anxious, angry, and exuberant, he is an amiable companion who speaks spontaneously and honestly of the issues that beset him. If we wish to understand his art, he provides many clues — and often does so in an engaging, open manner.

A biography should bring its subject to life so that the reader obtains a great deal of knowledge about how that person saw the world. A biographer can accumulate a great many useful facts to trace objectively a person’s life experiences, but the reader ultimately wants to know the subject. This kind of intimacy is sometimes hard to come by, but Milne provides a great deal of evidence about his own subjectivity. In this book, I have tried to blend the objective and the subjective in such a way so as to create as faithful a portrait as possible of the real David Milne.

* * *

Even from his earliest years in New York City, Milne inserted autobiographical elements into his oils and watercolours. There is another way of making this observation. Although David Milne wrote an autobiography, authored many letters and, at times, kept a journal, he reserved the recording of his inner self to his paintings, drawings, and prints. There, on display for anyone who cares to look, he laid bare his existence. A man who peered deeply into nature in order to understand his life, he precisely charted in his pictures his sojourn upon the earth.

In particular, more than most artists, Milne wrote candidly about the process of making images, about the tremendous excitement he felt when he had accomplished what he set out to do. The life-writer must pay attention to these remarks, but he must also carefully, as I have suggested, sift through Milne’s diaries and letters to uncover the private side of a man who may have been open about his artistic feelings but carefully guarded his personal ones.

In fact, Milne avoided talking about the meaning of his images. He was always concerned about how successfully he had elicited or captured a subject; he discussed his work in terms of colour values. He insisted he was interested in form rather than content, as if these two things can readily be separated from each other. Nevertheless, in those remarks he leaves many hints to guide the viewer in understanding his work. As far as he was concerned, it was not his job to interpret his paintings.

In reality, Milne was an extremely self-referential artist. In order to understand his inner world, his works of art must be read as pieces of autobiography. In the history of Western art, many artists portrayed the world in which they lived. For example, some male artists paint portraits of their wives or mistresses, or they show these women in domestic interiors, or they use the rooms in which they live as starting points for compositions. There is nothing startling in such practices. Milne was drawn to this kind of representation.

Additionally, some artists, such as Vuillard, Matisse, and Milne, choose to insert themselves in subtle (sometime, not so subtle) ways into their compositions. A favourite book will be on display, a work of art created by the artist will be shown, the tools (such as paint brushes or easels) of the artist’s trade will be incorporated into a still life, or a self-portrait will include part of a room’s interior. Milne made many such images.

In Milne’s late work, there are pictures that contain a fascinating mix of biblical imagery in which he reinvented his life in mythological terms. He transformed himself, in turn, into Noah, St. Francis of Assisi, and Christ Risen from the Dead. What was implied early in his work became fully explicit later on.

* * *

Milne shied away from putting intimate thoughts into words. Instead, he inserted such reflections into his paintings. In order to uncover David Milne the man, his biographer must be prepared to use the paintings as evidence to uncover the person who created them.

Specifically, Milne underwent many transformations in style during his career — these can be especially glimpsed in how a new place and its accompanying surroundings would lead him to new forms of stylistic expression.

This is to be expected of a painter whose career was centred on landscape, since he intently studied each locale in which he lived and was sensitive to how each differed from the other. Those differences are then encapsulated in his art, because every new setting engendered a new response. I have called this book Inner Places because Milne’s inner world is depicted in his paintings, especially his landscapes and later subject pictures, and because his inner world shifts markedly during his career. The ups and downs of Milne’s inner life can be discerned by paying close attention to these changes. As he once said: The man changes, and with that, the painting.[11]

* * *

Why do we still need David Milne?

In him we behold a man who gave his all to the creation of works of art in which the possibility of renewal and rebirth exist. In him we witness a man who dared to be his own person. In him we see a man who challenged the claims of materialism.

Like many great painters, Milne created his own distinct world. Moreover, this book is about a man who risked everything in the service of his art. By ordinary reckoning, Milne paid a heavy price for his creativity. By his own estimation, however, he accomplished what he set out to do. His legacy endures in the wondrous paintings and prints in which he charted his pilgrim’s progress.

* During the Palgrave years, he made some significantly larger images.

One

Face-to-Face with Infinity (1881–1892)

Thrilling, mysterious, exciting.[1] These are David Milne’s words celebrating his birthplace in Saugeen Township in Ontario’s Bruce County. His parents, emigrants from Aberdeenshire in Scotland, were, he said, peasants, or, if someone found such a label distasteful, he allowed them to be deemed persons of the soil.[2] For all practical purposes, they were hired hands or subsistence farmers — people who diligently tilled the land without much financial reward.

Milne was born on Saturday, January 8, 1881, in a small log farmhouse, but the family home in which he remembered living — and growing up — was a short distance away. This farmhouse was less than a mile west of Burgoyne and was rented from Will Hogg.[3] As Milne recalled, the log house was known to me only by report, and all that was left in my day was a grassy cellar hole and some sweet briars and lilac bushes. As a child, he remembered the flower garden in front of his family’s gray weather beaten[4] house, the barn on the hill behind the house, and an old log house in the orchard that was later converted into a chicken house.

Years later, Milne the adult stood in the manicured, resplendently green churchyard in Fyvie, Scotland, and was thrilled to realize how unfailingly his paternal ancestors had held to this land.[5] They were plowmen, farmers, and, especially, millers.

Members of his mother’s family had held a wider variety of occupations: they had been shopkeepers and farm servants. Perhaps, he wondered, this side of his family tree might have engendered his lapse[6] into art as a profession, but he prided himself on his paternal ancestry. All his life he retained a taste for simple things, extending to an almost abnormal impatience with possessions that go beyond necessities.[7]

William Milne, circa 1893.

Mary Divortay Milne, circa 1893.

Like many other Scots of their generation, Milne’s parents immigrated to Canada because prospects of obtaining gainful employment were significantly better in the New World. William, the artist’s father, was born in Fyvie in Aberdeenshire in 1835; Mary Divortay on July 12, 1839 or 1840 at Udney, not far from Fyvie. The couple, who married in 1860, arrived in Canada, via Boston, in 1870, and settled near Collingwood, Ontario; two years later, they moved to Burgoyne, Ontario, in Bruce County.* Four of their ten children were born in Scotland: William (1862), James (c.1863), Isabel (1865), and Charles (1867); the others, John (1872), Francis (1873), Robert (1874), Mary (1875), Arthur (1880), and David (1881), were born in Ontario. Since Mary and Arthur died as infants, Robert, eight years older, was the closest in age to David.**

William was an avid gardener and reader. Mary shared those interests. She was livelier than her husband, and her tableaux (made from dry leaves, flowers, and moss) won prizes at local fairs. Both parents were steadfast Presbyterians who believed in hard work and self-discipline as the cornerstones of their faith. Although as an adult Milne never attended church, he believed in a god whose presence was reflected in nature. The boy had an excellent knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments and could recite large passages of the Bible from memory.

* * *

For Milne the child, the world was a place of unfolding beauty. He retained a precise visual memory of the cabin where he was born: On the back of it, along the edge of Black’s bush, there was a hill and from the top of a stump on that hill we could see mostly everything, our own fields and barn and part of the house, Finnie’s pasture and berry patch, another farm and then the valley through which the Saugeen River flowed, Brown’s farm very small and faint, and beyond it sand hills. Beyond the sand hills a long straight streak of blue, sometimes with a white moving speck on it, Lake Huron.[8]

* * *

Early on, Milne was aware of the divergent ways in which people can lead their lives. One set of neighbours, the Finnies, Scots, were, like his parents, stalwart believers in thrift, reticence, and church values, whereas the other, low Dutch, were, in contrast, much more adventurous — and outlandish: Windows in vacant houses might be broken and cats were occasionally hanged over beams in the barn. Dead chickens or cats were given impressive funerals. There was no mourning, all pomp and circumstance. If any real mourning were involved on the death of any pets no ceremony was arranged. Games at Keopkes were more exciting and fearful. These were thrilling adventures. There was no feeling of guilt or pity at the time, not until retribution caught up with us. I don’t remember what my punishments for these affairs were when they became known, but the punishment of the Keopke boys made a deep impression on my mind. The offender was sent out to the orchard to cut a switch and with this he was whipped, while the rest of us looked on in delicious terror.[9]

At the home of the Finnies hung prints of a stag by Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) and a depiction of the Battle of Waterloo. These were among the first works of art the young David Milne glimpsed. He had also likely thumbed the pages of his family’s set of Picturesque Canada illustrated by Lucius O’Brien (1832–1899) and other Canadian artists of the time.

The young child might have found the Scots dull, but he was obviously a bit taken aback by the doings of the Dutch. The divisions Milne perceived in these two families reflect some elements in his personality: he was frugal and reflective, but he would later eagerly pursue the thrill he experienced when making art.

Robert, eight years older than David, tutored his brother in rebellious behaviour. For instance, he taught him about smoking elm root. There were great piles of logs and brush burning for days and he took me back to see them. Dried roots of the elm have pores running through them and smoke can be sucked through them. He picked a section of elm root about the length and thickness of a small cigar, lit it at the burning logs and set about some furious smoking. Me too. Very nice and very smoky, and doesn’t make anybody sick. I suppose he introduced me to other bits of childhood lore, though such things as basswood whistles, pea shooters and catapults seem to me to have come later, in school days. Anyway, there always seemed to be some trifling with the forbidden in Bob’s leading.[10] Bob also took David fishing on the Sabbath and placed his younger brother on a log from which he fell into the creek. Both lads were severely disciplined.

David’s other brothers — William, James, and Charles — teased him mercilessly. My handling of the Scotch dialect … amused them greatly, and cured me — practically drove me to talking English. I remember the exact phrase that broke this Scottish camel’s back: ‘The loons are comin’ hame the nicht’ — ‘The boys are coming home tonight.’[11]

The child also learned that it was dangerous to be frank about his feelings, particularly romantic ones. Liddy or Lydia must have been near the top public school age and I saw her as I watched at the window for the school children. She may have waved to me, and so reached a high place in my esteem. At first I answered all enquiries about Lydia without reserve but that didn’t do. I couldn’t see anything funny and the brothers did. The ‘Liddy’ was hidden — or more likely sacrificed. Liddy may have been thrown to the wolves, but Santa Claus wasn’t.[12]

In fact, his older brothers ridiculed Milne when he claimed to have heard Santa Claus coming down the stovepipe. He also wistfully observed: The Death of the Santa Claus idea [is] the first stage of the disillusionment of children. Very important.[13]

This young child was extremely observant, his eyes eager to take in and make sense of his small world. The gravel pit was a museum and I probably saw more strange and interesting things there than I have seen in any museums since. Barn and stables, sheep shed and pigpens and the animals in them were schools of natural history. In them learning was effortless, eager, frenzied even sometimes — when newborn lambs and calves and pigs and colts appeared and invited study, even cooperated in the lessons. The orchard I knew well but I remember little about the fields or what was grown in them…. The flower garden … is clear, vivid, scented and dewy. I remember where the red roses were and where the white, the paths and grass plots still hold their geometric precision. The new shoots of tiny roses and lilies of the valley push up through the ground with photographic clearness.[14]

* * *

As a young child, Milne slept snugly in a wooden box behind the stove. He was a small boy, but a strong one. Temperamentally, he was Mary’s son: opinionated and stolid. In contrast, his father, William, remained for young David an insubstantial presence, someone who suddenly appeared at noon on stormy days with icicles on his beard.[15] Like his mother, Milne was a strong-willed person; like his father, he often liked his own company best.***

Another early influence was William Hogg, the Milnes’ landlord at Burgoyne. According to Milne, it was he — when he lodged with his own tenants — who taught him to read. Mary’s influence over her son remained profound. She told him stories and provided him with her sharp observations of the natural world and regaled him with anecdotes about her family; these stories likely consisted of detailed descriptions of the poverty she had endured in Scotland and in Ontario.

According to one report, she worked in neighbouring farmhouses for twenty-five cents a day and sold strawberries for six or seven cents a quart.[16] Despite the hardships she experienced, material success was never her goal. Rather, her love of literature drew her to characters who were not the heroes of success.[17] This had the effect of pulling her youngest child away from the usual standards of worldly accomplishment.

* * *

The child was intrigued by the patterns made by frost on the windowpanes and fascinated by the intricate structures of snowflakes. He pressed pennies and keys against the frozen panes to leave behind his own designs. He had, he wryly recalled, the usual period of child’s drawings, moons and suns and houses and Jerusalem cherry trees…. Done in watercolour on the blank ruled pages of a small almanac, they had only one remembered characteristic. They were heavy, the watercolour was applied as thick as it would go. Probably no more substantial moons and suns were ever painted.[18] He added: They were nowhere near as good as the children’s art we see nowadays.

Even as a youngster, Milne was a true original and a bit of a rebel: Drawing was the only subject I ever failed in at public school, perspective and copying never seemed interesting. But I kept up my interest in drawing on my own, particularly careful and detailed drawings of plants…. I must have been really interested in this because I filled several notebooks with plant pictures.[19]

Another inspiration was probably David Brown, the deaf son of the farmer for whom William Milne worked. William and the elder Brown were sufficiently close that David’s middle name, Brown, was bestowed in honour of him. Evidently, David Brown, a person of high intelligence and curiosity … taught Milne to draw & paint. He made sketches & showed them to the boy & planted the seed. Brown also possessed a telescope that he shared with Milne so that they could study the stars.[20]

In an early photograph, the ten- or eleven-year-old glances into the distance. Dressed in suit and tie with his left shoulder turned toward the photographer, the slightly stocky, snub-nosed, sober little boy has conventional facial features except for his hooded eyes, from which a steady glow emanates: he is studying carefully what he beholds, as if imagining how he can re-order and thus re-create what he witnesses.

David Milne, about age eleven, circa 1892.

There was a steady determination in Milne’s personality: he totally dedicated his existence to his art (despite the many privations he would suffer). Moreover, he did not like to be distracted from his work. This side of his personality is more than compensated for by his generosity and friendliness. And yet, from childhood, he perceived the world as often harsh — even while he sought to capture its myriad beauties. Art, like flowers, might be useless in the eyes of most people, but for him, the rigorous pursuit of art through nature remained his life’s cornerstone.

David Milne the child knew the glories of existence: he witnessed it in trees, mountains, ponds, lakes, and flowers. For him, the world was alive with wonder. Milne the adult discovered a variety of ways to replicate that miracle.

Milne remained unfalteringly a person of the land. For instance, as a child, he was deeply aware of the beauty of the various flowers in his mother’s rural garden. He once claimed, I think we go to flowers as we go to art, because both are useless. Our devotion to either or both is a statement of faith, a declaration that for us there is more to life than mere continuance.[21]

For Milne, the confrontation between nature and art was the essence of life. Milne the artist saw himself as someone who eagerly sought to respond to the ecstasy he found within the natural world. However, for him nature was a powerful force that often resisted his attempts to capture her; for most of his life, he sought in his art to grasp the essential spark between it and infinity — the invisible presence that governed nature.

As a boy, he had a moment of intense realization when he beheld a stump on a nearby hill that offered an excellent vantage point from which to view his tiny world: at that place, for the first time, I was brought face to face with Infinity where anything might be and anything might happen.[22] The pursuit of that anything would be his life’s quest.

* In a brief memoir (Milne Family Papers), Charles Milne states: Our first home in Canada was in the township of Derby Grey County…. Sometime during my fifth year [c. 1872] we moved to a new home at Burgoyne.

The reasons the Milnes moved from the Collingwood area to Burgoyne and, soon after, Paisley, are not known. Collingwood was incorporated as a town in 1858 and was named for Admiral Lord Cuthbert Collingwood, Lord Nelson’s second-in-command at the Battle of Trafalgar. In 1855, the Ontario, Simcoe & Huron (later called the Northern) Railway came into Collingwood, and the harbour became the shipping point for goods destined for the Upper Great Lakes ports of Chicago and Port Arthur–Fort William (now Thunder Bay). The Paisley area, including Burgoyne, is approximately one hundred kilometres west of Collingwood and is located at the junction of the Saugeen and Teeswater Rivers. This area was surveyed in 1855 on land the government had set aside for a town. Early settlers built a sawmill there. By 1867, a foundry and woollen mill were established and the community prospered. In 1872, the Wellington, Grey and Bruce Railway was completed. Two years later, Paisley was incorporated as a village.

** Written on the back of an envelope by Kathleen Milne (circa 1952) is this list, probably dictated by Milne: D’s family: George, Willie, Frank, Jack, Bob, Isabel, Charlie, Jim, Arthur, Mary, David. George was Milne’s