Manitoba as Muse

Phillips found it easy to transfer his ability to study and render the geographic variation, seasonal diversity, mood, and form of the English landscape to the Canadian prairies. The best sketching ground he wrote, was “wherever I happen to be.” Locale did not matter: “It is light I paint: the sun, and its corollary, colour.” His earliest sketching ground in Manitoba was the Lake of the Woods where he gloried in the “grotesque but graceful curves” of the jack pine, the wide open sky, and the granite shield.