‘A PIECE OF HISTORY’
FREDERICK BANTING PAINTING DEPICTS LAB WHERE INSULIN WAS DISCOVERED
Apainting up for auction provides an intimate look at the site of one of the most important medical discoveries of the 20th century — as rendered by one of its discoverers.
For most, Frederick Banting is best known as the Nobel Prizewinning Canadian physician whose research alongside medical student Charles Best led to the 1921 discovery of insulin, which revolutionized the treatment of diabetes.
But in artistic circles, Banting is also recognized for his prowess as a landscape painter, earning him the friendship of the Group of Seven’s A.Y. Jackson, as well as posthumous success on the auction market.
These dual identities converge in The Lab, which experts say is Banting’s only known portrayal of an interior scene. The painting conveys the artist’s singular perspective on the scientific setting that would define his life, while saving perhaps millions of others.
“When you hold this painting, you really feel like you’re holding a piece of history,” said David Heffel, president of Heffel Fine Arts Auction House, which will feature the work in its fall sale.
“Foremost, it’s a great painting by one of Canada’s great painters, but also, that great painter was a Nobel Prize-winning medical scientist.”
According to its inscription, Banting painted the oil-on-board piece on a winter’s night in 1925 at the University of Toronto laboratory where he and Best had made their medical breakthrough just years prior.
The scene is cluttered with scientific paraphernalia, bounded by shelves that guide the viewer’s gaze through subtle palette shifts with each new row of beakers, tubes and vials. The sea of glassware is broken up by a window and green lamp that cast bleary light on the busiest part of the workbench, where a chair sits empty beside it.
The painting, which has been appraised at between $20,000 and $30,000, is imbued with the intimacy of an artist who has spent countless hours with every piece of equipment depicted, said Heffel, while also offering glimmers of the spontaneity involved in scientific inquiry.
For Toronto-based art historian Gregory Humeniuk, the painting’s organized chaos provides Banting’s own view of his “professional landscape,” and the parallel creative forces that drove him towards experimentation in both science and art.
“For both the artist and the scientist, I think at the highest level, there’s always a desire to do something new, but you have to work within limits,” said Humeniuk.
“The mind was working in slightly different ways, but I think they both fed into each other.”
Humeniuk said Banting took a studious approach to art, styling himself in the Group of Seven’s landscape tradition, and constantly looking to Jackson for tips on how to improve.
Together, the unlikely artistic duo would venture across the country with sketchbooks and paints to capture the untamed corners of the Canadian landscape, offering Banting both a literal and spiritual refuge from the demands of his glory-bound career, Humeniuk said.
Banting’s presence is especially evident in The Lab due to the unusual interplay of his vocation and avocation in a contained setting, Humeniuk added.
“This image is sort of a significant and compelling piece of that puzzle, of what his life was, and that makes it unlike the other ones.”
The Lab could be a reflection of Banting’s own muddled mindset at the time of its creation, said Christopher Rutty of Health Heritage Research Services.
At a time when diabetes was considered a fatal condition, Rutty said the discovery of insulin was an achievement akin to “resurrecting the dead,” earning Banting a degree of fame about which the soft-spoken scientist was profoundly ambivalent.
“A lot happened in that room. It was very personal for Banting, obviously. It changed his life. Sometimes, for the worse,” he said. “Everything was just a real whirlwind for him; that explains a lot of his attraction to art.”
Rutty said it was around this “turning point” that Banting connected with his research associate Sadie Gairns, to whom The Lab was originally gifted. The painting changed hands two more times before it was consigned for auction, according to Heffel.
Gairns and Banting enjoyed a mutually devoted working relationship, which at one point blossomed into an affair, said Rutty, citing the late historian Michael Bliss’s Banting: A Biography.
In the 1992 edition of book, Bliss recalls visiting Gairns’s bare-walled apartment after her death to find half a dozen Banting sketches stowed away in the bottom of one of her closets, and hypothesizes that she sold his other works to support herself over the years.
Banting had told friends that after he turned 50, he planned to abandon his scientific endeavours and pursue painting full time.
But after the Second World War broke out, Banting put patriotism before painting and reported for duty in 1941, a decision Gairns was almost alone in opposing, according to Bliss.
While en route to a mission in the U.K., Banting was killed in a plane crash near Musgrave Harbour, N.L. He was 49.
“It’s our understanding that, at that time, that was going to be one of his last professional engagements,” said Heffel. “Part of the ... mystery is trying to imagine what paintings would have been produced after his death.”
The Lab will be previewed in Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto in the weeks leading up to Heffel Fine Arts Auction House’s fall sale on Nov. 21. The auction house is donating its commission from the piece’s sale to the University of Toronto’s Banting & Best Diabetes Centre.
A LOT HAPPENED IN THAT ROOM. IT WAS VERY PERSONAL FOR BANTING, OBVIOUSLY. IT CHANGED HIS LIFE. SOMETIMES, FOR THE WORSE. EVERYTHING WAS JUST A REAL WHIRLWIND FOR HIM. — CHRISTOPHER RUTTY