James Wilson Morrice in North Africa

Many Canadian art lovers know James Wilson Morrice’s paintings of Paris and of his native Quebec, but this talk offers a unique opportunity to discover the later North African paintings of one of Canada’s most celebrated painters, whose Quebecois landscapes are currently on view in River of Dreams: Impressionism on St. Lawerence.

Morrice was already a seasoned traveler in his mid-forties when he made his first trips to North Africa in the early 1910s. During subsequent visits, he produced distinctive interpretations of the local landscape and everyday life, painted with his characteristic formal simplicity but enriched by a new and bolder colour palette.

In commemoration of the artist’s untimely death on January 24, 1924, join us for a conversation with Katerina Atanassova, Senior Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada, a leading Morrice expert.

Katerina Atanassova is Senior Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada where she has overseen the reinstallation of the Canadian art collection in the Indigenous and Canadian Galleries. She has curated award-winning exhibitions of historical and contemporary Canadian art in Canada and abroad, including William Berczy – Man of Enlightenment (2004), F. H. Varley: Portraits Into the Light (2006), Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven (2011), James Wilson Morrice: The A. K. Prakash Collection in Trust to the Nation (2017) and Canada and Impressionism: New Horizons (2019).