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In the summer of 1947, Milton Avery, his wife Sally, and their daughter March took an extensive road trip through the Canadian and American Rockies. After a three week stop in Cobourg, Ontario, where they stayed with Mrs. Robert Lee Blaffer at her house, St. Anne, they continued on to visit Banff, Jasper, and Lake Louise, before travelling onto Oregon and the Pacific Coast. Along the way, Avery filled his sketchbooks with drawings, which he worked from to create such paintings as Mountain Lake, 1947, once he returned to his New York studio. The drawings he created included schematic color notes that served only as a very general guide. By the late 1940s, the artist intensified his colors while simultaneously detaching them from literal description. In this manner, Avery composed “near-abstract arrangement of large-scale interlocking planes and lush passages of painting [that] fluctuate between flatness and spatial illusion” (Karen Wilkin, Milton Avery: Paintings of Canada, Kingston, 1968, p. 23).

In Mountain Lake, Avery does not depict the towering cliffs of the Rockies, but instead chooses to focus on a distant view of a mountain, and before it, the flat plane of a still blue lake and a surrounding dense green forest. According to Sally Avery, “her husband declared that the mountains were ‘not paintable,’” preferring to paint the lake-filled valleys (Wilkin, ibid.). Spaciousness and depth are conveyed through layers of color, from the evergreen mass in the foreground, to the shifting celadons of the surrounding trees, and extending to the pale blue of the lake and faraway aquamarine peak. Like his other landscapes, the location of this composition cannot be specifically placed; however, Avery’s “landscapes are not just any landscapes but have the bewitching quality of recalling to each observer a particular landscape” (Una Johnson, Milton Avery: Prints and Drawings, 1920-1964, 1966, p. 14).

Avery’s remarkable distillation of three-dimensional objects and space into energetic two-dimensional structures reveal his push toward near-abstraction. Described in expansive bands of blues and greens, the mountain landscape is reduced to its purest form. “I always take something out of my pictures,” the artist remarked. “I strip the design to essentials; the facts do not interest me so much as the essence of nature” (Johnson, ibid., p. 148). Yet he always includes some detail, such as the trunks of the trees and variegations of their leaves, that preclude the composition from becoming entirely abstract. Through the potency of Avery’s color and economic, unmodulated shapes, the present canvas effectively synthesizes abstract color painting and perceived reality, without trivializing either. His work was to have a distinct impact on his artist friends Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who would go on to push his ideas fully into abstraction.