Painting Place

This lavishly illustrated study tells the remarkable story of the work of one of Canada's great artists. David B. Milne (1882–1953) left rural Ontario for New York City in 1903. After training at the Art Students' League, he emerged as an exceptional modernist, one of the "American extremists" whose work was well-represented at the famous 1913 Armory Show and won a major prize at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. Milne's studio at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue was a regular forum for artists to debate art and aesthetics.

In 1916 Milne moved to Boston Corners, in upstate New York, devoting his whole time to painting. As he wandered over the years to the deserted battlefields of France and Belgium, to the Adirondacks, then back to Canada – Temagami, Palgrave, Muskoka, Toronto, Uxbridge, and Baptiste Lake – his work continued to evolve and change. Critics and other artists hailed him as one of the most original, intelligent, and innovative artists in Canada. His work is in the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and public galleries in Canada.

Silcox's biography, based on many years of research for the Milne　Catalogue Raisonné, has been described as "a near-perfect dialectic between biography and aesthetic analysis."It stands both as a definitive study of Milne and as a model for future biographies of Canadian artists.

This gorgeous book, in a large format with 190 images in colour and 240 black-and-white illustrations throughout, will astonish and delight all those interested in art history, and in the life of a unique individual.

David P. Silcox, former managing director of Sotheby's Canada, is an art historian, a cultural administrator, and a senior fellow at Massey College.