The painting today known as Camp at Sunrise was originally exhibited as The Ranges, one of a handful of military-themed canvases that Watson painted during and immediately after the First World War. General Sam Hughes, Canada’s Minister of Militia, requested that Watson document recruitment and training at Camp Valcartier in Quebec.

This canvas is clearly the work of someone at home with landscape painting but who does not usually make human activity the dominant element in his art. As the Montreal Herald put it, Watson depicted “temporary events in a permanent setting.”