Fergus Arthur Paul

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The time frame is the afternoon of October 30, 1939.

On the scale of overarching and convulsive events, the Second World War is almost two months old.

In central Europe, the Blitzkrieg unleashed by Adolf Hitler has smashed the Polish army, Warsaw has capitulated, and the Soviet Union, with its own invasion from the east, has joined with Nazi Germany in dividing Poland, as per a secret clause in their non-aggression pact of August 23.

In western Europe, the armies of France and Great Britain prepare for confrontation with a battle-tried, triumphant Wehrmacht, and newspapers report almost daily clashes along the Franco-German border east of the Maginot Line.

In the North Atlantic, the German submarine campaign has begun on Allied shipping, with a recent victim the British battleship Royal Oak, torpedoed in mid-October at its Scapa Flow anchorage with the loss of over eight hundred men and boys.

Far to the west, on the continent of North America, the rocks and lakes of the Canadian Shield near Georgian Bay in Ontario lie also within this official war zone, fifty days into the Dominion of Canada’s declaration of a state of war with Nazi Germany, that followed by a week Great Britain’s of September 3.

In an isolated cabin by one of these lakes, three men of different generations have been sorting through paintings in oils and watercolour: much of the life’s work of the oldest among them, a little known artist named Fergus Dyce. His companions in judgment are his middle-aged agent, Arthur Lennox, and the still younger Paul Botsford, just back in Canada by ship after a year at Oxford University in England.

More will prove to be in play than standards in art.