This work, with its loosely painted bright blues and greens and clear light evoking spring or early summer in the Qu’Appelle Valley, is a good example of Henderson’s interest in the local scene and in light and colour. It is influenced by his experience of the work of the Glasgow Boys, such as Edward Arthur Walton (1860–1922) whose paintings he could have seen in Scotland before he left for London and in exhibitions in London after he moved there. It also shows the influence of the English Impressionists, such as Phillip Wilson Steer (1860–1942), who were members of the New English Art Club and with whom Henderson exhibited in 1909. These artists incorporated aspects of French Impressionism, the new Scottish art, and their own landscape traditions, from Constable to Turner, into a new colourist and atmospheric art. While many of the Glasgow Boys and the English Impressionists focused on the figure in the landscape, such as farm workers or city strollers, Henderson limited figures of humans or animals to a secondary position, often as small, almost decorative elements, such as a mother and child walking on a road or cows grazing on a hillside or in a coulee.
-Dan Ring
Bend in the Creek, c. 1925
Oil on canvas
49.9 x 60.0 cm
Collection of James Lanigan, Calgary, AB.
