Art historian David Silcox’s biography of painter David Milne (1882–1953) has finally arrived, more than two decades after the University of Toronto art historian took on the mammoth project. Painting Place is the first of four volumes. Forthcoming is a catalogue raisonné, David B. Milne: Selected Writing, and a CD-ROM. There isn’t a Canadian artist who has received such thorough investigation and compilation, ever. Which immediately begs the question: Who is going to read all this?

Everyone should, since Milne is a painter of major importance to Canadian art, in the same vein as Tom Thomson, and while most of us can spot a Milne landscape, few know much about him. The 10th child of a poor Ontario farmer, Milne moved to New York to attend art school and then left almost immediately after he started receiving critical recognition, confident enough to move to the countryside and never return to city life. A man of absolute dedication and conviction, Milne did almost nothing but paint, usually two paintings a day; the result was an enormous stash of well over 2,000 works, 300 of which he sold to the Massey family near the end of his life at $5 a canvas to ward off starvation and have his teeth fixed.

Milne was not so much a neglected painter as a recluse who didn’t have the business acumen or desire to do anything but stockpile his creations. He worked against the grain of his contemporaries and didn’t meander from one theme, one style to the next. He was painstakingly consistent and repetitious. Switching from oil to watercolour, from black outline to white fill-in between contours were revolutionary developments for Milne, who plowed on with the patience and frugality of a Zen monk. His work is meditative, not flamboyant, and there is no one work that is definitively Milne. Silcox makes it clear that Milne’s masterpiece is his entire body of work.

Silcox takes a straightforward, chronological approach to documenting Milne’s life. He is passionate about his subject, and occasionally grammatically atavistic (when was the last time you read “hither and yon”?). But one would expect more insight into the artist’s psyche; Silcox has been living in Milne’s shoes for the past two decades. Silcox sticks doggedly to the facts and skirts around personal opinion despite his expert vantage point. Of Milne’s early successes in New York and later as a war artist, Silcox only tenuously suggests Milne’s ego may have led him to expect the art world to come to him rather than the other way round.

Any hint of Milne’s stoical character comes primarly from Milne, mostly through correspondence with his close friend and benefactor, New York art director James Clarke. Judging from Milne’s letters – which he wrote at the same fervent pace as he painted – he was a brilliant man possessed of a vivid spontaneity and wry wit. Canada he called the “Land of Promise” with both irony and hope in his voice. Of Tom Thomson, Milne once wrote: “it would have been wiser to have taken your 10 most prominent Canadians and sunk them in Canoe Lake – and saved Tom Thomson.”

Painting Place fills in a huge gap in Canadian art history. The only missing link is an equally ambitious gallery retrospective; something Silcox points out – with only slight repugnance – has yet to happen.