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Provenance: Douglas Duncan at the Picture Loan Society, Toronto Robertson Galleries, Ottawa, 1967 Pauline Jewett, Vancouver and Ottawa, 1967 Private Collection, Cambridge Private Collection, Montreal

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Exhibited: Drawings and Watercolours by David Milne and LeMoine FitzGerald, Robertson Galleries, Ottawa, September, 1967, no. 31

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Literature: David Milne Jr. and David P. Silcox, David B. Milne, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume II, 1929-1953, p. 671, also illustrated. See p. 394 for an illustration of Paper Box no. 304.5

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Notes: When Milne lived at Six Mile Lake from 1933 to 1939, he found most of his subject matter close at hand. In 1937 he began painting in watercolour again, after a twelve-year hiatus. Empty Box, painted in 1938, is one of a series of versions of an earlier 1935 oil titled Paper Box. From this oil, other renditions were made of the same subject in watercolours and in two later drypoints. Milne writes about the creation of Empty Box in a diary entry dated May 10, 1940: "In this picture of a paper box, the subject is so simple that it would be too easily grasped, would be all over with before any feeling was stirred. The object of the design was not so much to direct the attention as to slow up the progress through the picture. This was done by breaking up the lines by varying the emphasis on them or by omitting parts of them -- by confusing them. Even then it was thought necessary to include the cup with a flower to still further slow up the progress." This work is in the Milne Catalogue Raisonné as no. 306.52.