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Alexander Colville 1920 - Canadian ink wash on paper Study for French Cross 6 x 8 inches 15.2 x 20.3 centimeters signed and dated July 25, 26, 1988 Provenance:Private Collection, Toronto This fine drawing is a preparatory work for Colville's extraordinary painting French Cross, lot 18 in this sale. Colville's practice before creating a painting is to make a series of drawings of progressive complexity, in media that include graphite, ink wash and acrylic. Twelve drawings for French Cross were included in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' 1994 exhibition of Alex Colville: Paintings, Prints and Processes, which show Colville's explorations of sight lines, individual elements such as the cross, and composition choices. Colville distills the image down to its essentials and studies the relationship of each object to the other and its place in the landscape, seeking to find the most powerful visual embodiment of his concept for the painting. Study for French Cross is one of his final drawings in which the elements of the painting to follow are in place. The cross that the figure looks back at commemorates the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, following war between France and Britain. Colville's image resonates with an awareness of the powerful sociological changes brought by this historic event, and the importance of remembering it - and in this looking back, to become aware of the unknown changes the future will bring.