At the age of twenty-one, Milne left Canada to study art at the Art Student's League in New York from 1903-05. He supported himself by doing commercial design and painted in his spare time. In 1917, he joined the Canadian army and was sent to Europe. After the war, he painted camp scenes and deserted battlefields for the Canadian War Records. He returned to New York State for another ten years. In 1929, Milne returned permanently to Canada, first settling in Temagami, then Weston, then at Palgrave, Six Mile Lake, Toronto, Uxbridge, and finally at Baptiste Lake near Bancroft, Ontario. A change in place for Milne always resulted in a change of colour, form, and theme in his work.
By 1934, with the patronage of Alice and Vincent Massey, Milne's work was seen by Alan Jarvis ( later he would become the Director of the National Gallery) and Douglas Duncan who became Milne's agent. Through Duncan, the work of this recluse and individual painter became better known in Canada.
Milne was strongly influenced by both American and French Impressionism, especially the work of Claude Monet, and by Henri Matisse's Fauvism. Milne integrated these influences into his own special way of seeing and painting.His journals and painting notes reveal his observations and thoughts about his painting method, and artistic process.
In the last 15 years of his life, Milne began to paint a series of fantasies. These may have been inspired by children's paintings and possibly by the birth of his only child in 1941.
He is usually singled out by foreign curators and critics as our foremost painter. Clement Greenberg, the American art critic, thought Milne was, with American painters John Marin and Marsden Hartley, among the three most important artists of his generation in North America.
Approximately half of Milne's paintings are oils and half are watercolours. His lifetime production, after the destruction of many paintings throughout his career, stands at close to 3,000, with an equal number of drawings and prints. The National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Winnipeg Art Gallery all have excellent collections of his work.
The Canadian Encyclopédia: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/david-brown-milne
