The Canadian Scene: Seven Colour Prints and a Dissertation

This 1928 print belongs to a published portfolio that paired seven color prints with Phillips's written reflections on the Canadian landscape. Walter J. Phillips was unusual among printmakers for combining visual and literary production, and this portfolio represents his most ambitious synthesis of the two. The seven prints would have depicted representative Canadian scenes, likely spanning different seasons, regions, and landscape types to construct a composite portrait of the nation's terrain. The accompanying dissertation provided Phillips's perspective on what made the Canadian landscape distinctive and how the Japanese woodcut technique was suited to rendering it. Published in 1928, the portfolio appeared during a period of growing Canadian cultural nationalism, when artists and writers were working to define a specifically Canadian aesthetic identity independent of European models. Phillips's adoption of Japanese technique to depict Canadian subjects was itself a statement about artistic internationalism.