In the closing years of his career, between 1947 and 1952, David Milne turned his attention to the quiet landscapes surrounding Baptiste Lake and nearby Bancroft, Ontario. Having spent much of his life seeking solitude in nature, Milne found renewed inspiration in this rural region at the southeastern edge of Algonquin Park. After leaving Uxbridge, where he had lived with his second wife Kathleen and their young son, he purchased a small parcel of land near Baptiste Lake for ten dollars and built a modest log cabin entirely by hand. It was here that Milne, working in near isolation, produced some of the most distilled and expressive works of his life.

The present watercolour, Sports Arena, Bancroft (1951), captures the small Ontario town nestled among soft hills and clusters of dark trees under a sky streaked with drifting blue-grey clouds. Milne depicts the newly built Bancroft Arena—constructed in 1948 on the west side of the York River—as a warm ochre structure curving through the centre of the composition. The surrounding rooftops, trees, and open spaces evoke a place of community life and winter gatherings, where skating, broomball, and hockey animated the long northern season.

Rendered with Milne’s hallmark economy of line and confident, spontaneous brushwork, the painting conveys both architectural solidity and atmospheric lightness. By this stage in his career, his technique had evolved toward a kind of visual shorthand—each wash and contour planned with precision, then applied swiftly, in what David Silcox described as “the manner of the Zen masters.” The result is a composition at once calm and alive, resonant with Milne’s lifelong search for balance between structure and spirit.

Milne and his family settled permanently in Bancroft in 1952 as his health declined. He continued to paint there until his death the following year, at the age of seventy-one—leaving behind a body of work that distilled the essence of the Canadian landscape into its purest form.