This painting depicts a willow farmer in Doon, Ontario on a warm sunny day. Although Watson was most famous for his landscape paintings, he also created many paintings of the everyday lives of the local villagers. Watson spent several years living abroad yet nowhere inspired him like the landscape of his hometown.
“After some years of restless wandering in quest of an adequate medium of expression in art, a desire took possession of me to live again where I knew great quiet would blend itself luxuriously with the schemes I was developing for my painting. It came to me that, among the nooks and scenes of this village nestling among the hills, I should find ample material to fix in some degree the infinite beauties that emanate from the mystery of sky and land…” -Homer Watson in his unpublished memoir, A Landscape Painter’s Day
