Quebec Impressionism, from Bustling Cities to Bucolic Villages<\/h1><\/div>The Globe and Mail<\/h2><\/div>By: Kate Taylor<\/strong><\/p>\nJuly 25, 2024<\/strong><\/p>\nOriginal URL: Quebec Impressionism, from bustling cities to bucolic villages | The Globe and Mail<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>![](\"data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%27%20width%3D%271620%27%20height%3D%271210%27%20viewBox%3D%270%200%201620%201210%27%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%271620%27%20height%3D%271210%27%20fill-opacity%3D%220%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E\" "\\"The-Wayside-Cross,-Autumn_WEB\\"")
<\/span> <\/div>Clarence Alphonse Gagnon (1881\u20131942), The Wayside Cross, Autumn,<\/em> 1916, oil on canvas, 56 x 74.5 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1916, 1367. Photo: NGC. <\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>The McMichael Canadian Art Collection\u00a0in Kleinburg, Ont., makes a surprising claim for its current show of Quebec Impressionism, calling it the first of its kind in English Canada. Really? No one outside Quebec has ever devoted a show to the best of Quebec painting from the late 19th and early 20th century?<\/p>\n
Artists such as Clarence Gagnon, Marc-Aur\u00e8le de Foy Suzor-Cot\u00e9, James Wilson Morrice, Maurice Cullen and Robert Pilot are certainly well-known in English Canada, regular presences at auctions and in major public collections. They are particularly familiar in Ontario, from the Thomson collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario or the Blair Laing gift of Morrice paintings at the National Gallery of Canada. But they are also known outside central Canada, well represented in the collections of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, for example.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
![\"painting](\"data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%27%20width%3D%271620%27%20height%3D%271261%27%20viewBox%3D%270%200%201620%201261%27%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%271620%27%20height%3D%271261%27%20fill-opacity%3D%220%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E\" "\\"St.")
<\/span> <\/div>Robert Pilot (1898\u20131967), St. Patrick\u2019s Church, Montreal<\/em>, oil on canvas, 71.7 x 91.4 cm, Comsatec Inc. Photo: Heffel Fine Art Auction House.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>Still, nobody has a treasure trove like the one that belongs to the Mus\u00e9e national des beaux-arts in Quebec City. And right now, that institution has had to shutter some of its galleries to accommodate the expansion that will build a new wing devoted to the art of Jean-Paul Riopelle.<\/p>\n
So, to mark the 150th anniversary of Impressionism\u2019s birth in Paris, McMichael director Sarah Milroy and former Beaux Arts curator Anne-Marie Bouchard have put their heads together and come up with River of Dreams: Impressionism on the St. Lawrence. It\u2019s a show built around the Quebec City collection, much of which has not been seen outside Quebec, with key loans from corporate and private collections in the province and a few from other Canadian institutions too.<\/p>\n
Certainly, the breadth of this exhibition \u2013 about 150 lovely paintings \u2013 justifies the big claim.<\/p>\n
The curators weren\u2019t romanticizing when they picked that subtitle, Impressionism on the St. Lawrence: Rather cleverly, the displays move down the river, from Montreal toward the Atlantic, using geography as the key organizing principle. That allows each section to concentrate on a handful of artists: with a particular emphasis on Cullen and Pilot and the rediscovered Henrietta Mabel May in Montreal; Cullen and Suzor-Cot\u00e9 in Arthabaska, Pilot and Morrice in Quebec City, William Brymner and Morrice in the C\u00f4te de Beaupr\u00e9, and Gagnon in Charlevoix.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
![\"group](\"data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%27%20width%3D%271620%27%20height%3D%271431%27%20viewBox%3D%270%200%201620%201431%27%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%271620%27%20height%3D%271431%27%20fill-opacity%3D%220%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E\" "\\"Knitting_WEB\\"")
<\/span> <\/div>H. Mabel May (1877\u20131971), Knitting<\/em>, 1915, oil on panel, 91.4 x 102.2 cm, Pierre Lassonde Collection. Photo courtesy of Alan Klinkhoff Gallery, Toronto & Montreal.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>So, the visitor begins with the strong contrast between Suzor-Cot\u00e9’s two views of Montreal\u2019s industrial port under billowing smog with Cullen\u2019s romantic depiction of Dominion Square under snow (on loan from the Beaverbrook). They progress to Pilot\u2019s sunset view of St. Patrick\u2019s Church and a remarkable series of his vivid oil sketches of the city, mainly on loan from private collections, as well as several of May\u2019s social scenes, including one deceptively placid painting of women knitting socks \u2013 for the soldiers of the First World War.<\/p>\n
And then the show moves outside the city, to Suzor-Cot\u00e9’s portraits of the Mohawk residents of Kahnawake, their identities now lost to us, their deep faces rendered intelligently with neither romanticism nor stereotype by the artist. (In a signature Milroy touch, the show also includes a display of the beaded purses, pin cushions and little souvenir canoes that Kahnawake women would have taken into Montreal to sell.)<\/p>\n
In Arthabaska, viewers are treated to Suzor-Cot\u00e9’s utterly modern painting of the Northern Lights, depicted as white fans across a dark sky. Morrice\u2019s much-loved view of the ferry crossing the river at Quebec City from the National Gallery\u2019s collection is matched with a whole series of the same subject by both Morrice and Pilot. And the show ends with Gagnon\u2019s\u00a0charming views of the area around Baie-Saint-Paul dating to the 1910s and \u201820s.<\/p>\n
In the Beaupr\u00e9 region, views of haymaking by Morrice and Brymner are then juxtaposed with contemporaneous photographs by the American photographer Edith Watson. On the one hand, the painted and photographed images are sometimes direct matches, revealing that these paintings, which feel so romantic today, were actually quite observational.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, the painters often edited out the most obvious sign of approaching modernity: the telegraph lines that were already in place in the 19th century. Only Gagnon truly celebrates the arrival of technology with\u00a0The Train, Winter\u00a0of 1914. The tension displayed at the start of this exhibition between picturesque Montreal and industrial Montreal holds true throughout.<\/p>\n
Outside the bustling city, there are dozens of seductive rural scenes here, whose\u00a0luminous landscapes and nostalgic villages appeal so deeply to the settler. Quebec was settled earlier than Ontario, and its artists turned to pretty villages as much as stunning landscapes.<\/p>\n
In displaying\u00a0Early Spring Morning in the Laurentian Wilds, one of the few mountain landscapes, the curators note that Gagnon knew nothing of the mysterious land beyond the fertile valley, the territory that belonged to Indigenous nations. If Quebec artists concentrated on their own settlements, Ontario artists looked mainly at the landscape itself: With little white settlement to interrupt it, the artists of the Group of Seven easily fell prey to the fallacy of the empty land.<\/p>\n
The Quebec artists who brought Impressionism home from travels to France in the late 19th century were a large influence on the Group formed in 1920, particularly through A.Y. Jackson, the one member who was originally a Quebecker. And there are certainly moments here that make you ache for the disruption that is to come, paintings such as the fussy woodland scenes of Brymner or Ozias Leduc\u2019s\u00a0Green Apples, work\u00a0closer to France\u2019s earlier Barbizon school than Impressionism.<\/p>\n
Impressionism is a word that sells tickets, and in an era where the canon is expanding, it is no longer reserved for a handful of French artists painting in the 1870s and 1880s. The\u00a0Canada and Impressionism<\/a>\u00a0show of 2022 at the National Gallery of Canada\u00a0really stretched the definition of Impressionism; this tightly focused collection is a more convincing argument for looking outside France.<\/p>\nRiver of Dreams continues at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., to Jan. 12.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
The Globe and Mail<\/h2><\/div>By: Kate Taylor<\/strong><\/p>\nJuly 25, 2024<\/strong><\/p>\nOriginal URL: Quebec Impressionism, from bustling cities to bucolic villages | The Globe and Mail<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/span> <\/div>Clarence Alphonse Gagnon (1881\u20131942), The Wayside Cross, Autumn,<\/em> 1916, oil on canvas, 56 x 74.5 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1916, 1367. Photo: NGC. <\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>The McMichael Canadian Art Collection\u00a0in Kleinburg, Ont., makes a surprising claim for its current show of Quebec Impressionism, calling it the first of its kind in English Canada. Really? No one outside Quebec has ever devoted a show to the best of Quebec painting from the late 19th and early 20th century?<\/p>\n
Artists such as Clarence Gagnon, Marc-Aur\u00e8le de Foy Suzor-Cot\u00e9, James Wilson Morrice, Maurice Cullen and Robert Pilot are certainly well-known in English Canada, regular presences at auctions and in major public collections. They are particularly familiar in Ontario, from the Thomson collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario or the Blair Laing gift of Morrice paintings at the National Gallery of Canada. But they are also known outside central Canada, well represented in the collections of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, for example.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span> <\/div>Robert Pilot (1898\u20131967), St. Patrick\u2019s Church, Montreal<\/em>, oil on canvas, 71.7 x 91.4 cm, Comsatec Inc. Photo: Heffel Fine Art Auction House.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>Still, nobody has a treasure trove like the one that belongs to the Mus\u00e9e national des beaux-arts in Quebec City. And right now, that institution has had to shutter some of its galleries to accommodate the expansion that will build a new wing devoted to the art of Jean-Paul Riopelle.<\/p>\n
So, to mark the 150th anniversary of Impressionism\u2019s birth in Paris, McMichael director Sarah Milroy and former Beaux Arts curator Anne-Marie Bouchard have put their heads together and come up with River of Dreams: Impressionism on the St. Lawrence. It\u2019s a show built around the Quebec City collection, much of which has not been seen outside Quebec, with key loans from corporate and private collections in the province and a few from other Canadian institutions too.<\/p>\n
Certainly, the breadth of this exhibition \u2013 about 150 lovely paintings \u2013 justifies the big claim.<\/p>\n
The curators weren\u2019t romanticizing when they picked that subtitle, Impressionism on the St. Lawrence: Rather cleverly, the displays move down the river, from Montreal toward the Atlantic, using geography as the key organizing principle. That allows each section to concentrate on a handful of artists: with a particular emphasis on Cullen and Pilot and the rediscovered Henrietta Mabel May in Montreal; Cullen and Suzor-Cot\u00e9 in Arthabaska, Pilot and Morrice in Quebec City, William Brymner and Morrice in the C\u00f4te de Beaupr\u00e9, and Gagnon in Charlevoix.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span> <\/div>H. Mabel May (1877\u20131971), Knitting<\/em>, 1915, oil on panel, 91.4 x 102.2 cm, Pierre Lassonde Collection. Photo courtesy of Alan Klinkhoff Gallery, Toronto & Montreal.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>So, the visitor begins with the strong contrast between Suzor-Cot\u00e9’s two views of Montreal\u2019s industrial port under billowing smog with Cullen\u2019s romantic depiction of Dominion Square under snow (on loan from the Beaverbrook). They progress to Pilot\u2019s sunset view of St. Patrick\u2019s Church and a remarkable series of his vivid oil sketches of the city, mainly on loan from private collections, as well as several of May\u2019s social scenes, including one deceptively placid painting of women knitting socks \u2013 for the soldiers of the First World War.<\/p>\n
And then the show moves outside the city, to Suzor-Cot\u00e9’s portraits of the Mohawk residents of Kahnawake, their identities now lost to us, their deep faces rendered intelligently with neither romanticism nor stereotype by the artist. (In a signature Milroy touch, the show also includes a display of the beaded purses, pin cushions and little souvenir canoes that Kahnawake women would have taken into Montreal to sell.)<\/p>\n
In Arthabaska, viewers are treated to Suzor-Cot\u00e9’s utterly modern painting of the Northern Lights, depicted as white fans across a dark sky. Morrice\u2019s much-loved view of the ferry crossing the river at Quebec City from the National Gallery\u2019s collection is matched with a whole series of the same subject by both Morrice and Pilot. And the show ends with Gagnon\u2019s\u00a0charming views of the area around Baie-Saint-Paul dating to the 1910s and \u201820s.<\/p>\n
In the Beaupr\u00e9 region, views of haymaking by Morrice and Brymner are then juxtaposed with contemporaneous photographs by the American photographer Edith Watson. On the one hand, the painted and photographed images are sometimes direct matches, revealing that these paintings, which feel so romantic today, were actually quite observational.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, the painters often edited out the most obvious sign of approaching modernity: the telegraph lines that were already in place in the 19th century. Only Gagnon truly celebrates the arrival of technology with\u00a0The Train, Winter\u00a0of 1914. The tension displayed at the start of this exhibition between picturesque Montreal and industrial Montreal holds true throughout.<\/p>\n
Outside the bustling city, there are dozens of seductive rural scenes here, whose\u00a0luminous landscapes and nostalgic villages appeal so deeply to the settler. Quebec was settled earlier than Ontario, and its artists turned to pretty villages as much as stunning landscapes.<\/p>\n
In displaying\u00a0Early Spring Morning in the Laurentian Wilds, one of the few mountain landscapes, the curators note that Gagnon knew nothing of the mysterious land beyond the fertile valley, the territory that belonged to Indigenous nations. If Quebec artists concentrated on their own settlements, Ontario artists looked mainly at the landscape itself: With little white settlement to interrupt it, the artists of the Group of Seven easily fell prey to the fallacy of the empty land.<\/p>\n
The Quebec artists who brought Impressionism home from travels to France in the late 19th century were a large influence on the Group formed in 1920, particularly through A.Y. Jackson, the one member who was originally a Quebecker. And there are certainly moments here that make you ache for the disruption that is to come, paintings such as the fussy woodland scenes of Brymner or Ozias Leduc\u2019s\u00a0Green Apples, work\u00a0closer to France\u2019s earlier Barbizon school than Impressionism.<\/p>\n
Impressionism is a word that sells tickets, and in an era where the canon is expanding, it is no longer reserved for a handful of French artists painting in the 1870s and 1880s. The\u00a0Canada and Impressionism<\/a>\u00a0show of 2022 at the National Gallery of Canada\u00a0really stretched the definition of Impressionism; this tightly focused collection is a more convincing argument for looking outside France.<\/p>\nRiver of Dreams continues at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., to Jan. 12.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
By: Kate Taylor<\/strong><\/p>\n July 25, 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n Original URL: Quebec Impressionism, from bustling cities to bucolic villages | The Globe and Mail<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> Clarence Alphonse Gagnon (1881\u20131942), The Wayside Cross, Autumn,<\/em> 1916, oil on canvas, 56 x 74.5 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1916, 1367. Photo: NGC. <\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> The McMichael Canadian Art Collection\u00a0in Kleinburg, Ont., makes a surprising claim for its current show of Quebec Impressionism, calling it the first of its kind in English Canada. Really? No one outside Quebec has ever devoted a show to the best of Quebec painting from the late 19th and early 20th century?<\/p>\n Artists such as Clarence Gagnon, Marc-Aur\u00e8le de Foy Suzor-Cot\u00e9, James Wilson Morrice, Maurice Cullen and Robert Pilot are certainly well-known in English Canada, regular presences at auctions and in major public collections. They are particularly familiar in Ontario, from the Thomson collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario or the Blair Laing gift of Morrice paintings at the National Gallery of Canada. But they are also known outside central Canada, well represented in the collections of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, for example.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> Robert Pilot (1898\u20131967), St. Patrick\u2019s Church, Montreal<\/em>, oil on canvas, 71.7 x 91.4 cm, Comsatec Inc. Photo: Heffel Fine Art Auction House.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> Still, nobody has a treasure trove like the one that belongs to the Mus\u00e9e national des beaux-arts in Quebec City. And right now, that institution has had to shutter some of its galleries to accommodate the expansion that will build a new wing devoted to the art of Jean-Paul Riopelle.<\/p>\n So, to mark the 150th anniversary of Impressionism\u2019s birth in Paris, McMichael director Sarah Milroy and former Beaux Arts curator Anne-Marie Bouchard have put their heads together and come up with River of Dreams: Impressionism on the St. Lawrence. It\u2019s a show built around the Quebec City collection, much of which has not been seen outside Quebec, with key loans from corporate and private collections in the province and a few from other Canadian institutions too.<\/p>\n Certainly, the breadth of this exhibition \u2013 about 150 lovely paintings \u2013 justifies the big claim.<\/p>\n The curators weren\u2019t romanticizing when they picked that subtitle, Impressionism on the St. Lawrence: Rather cleverly, the displays move down the river, from Montreal toward the Atlantic, using geography as the key organizing principle. That allows each section to concentrate on a handful of artists: with a particular emphasis on Cullen and Pilot and the rediscovered Henrietta Mabel May in Montreal; Cullen and Suzor-Cot\u00e9 in Arthabaska, Pilot and Morrice in Quebec City, William Brymner and Morrice in the C\u00f4te de Beaupr\u00e9, and Gagnon in Charlevoix.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> H. Mabel May (1877\u20131971), Knitting<\/em>, 1915, oil on panel, 91.4 x 102.2 cm, Pierre Lassonde Collection. Photo courtesy of Alan Klinkhoff Gallery, Toronto & Montreal.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> So, the visitor begins with the strong contrast between Suzor-Cot\u00e9’s two views of Montreal\u2019s industrial port under billowing smog with Cullen\u2019s romantic depiction of Dominion Square under snow (on loan from the Beaverbrook). They progress to Pilot\u2019s sunset view of St. Patrick\u2019s Church and a remarkable series of his vivid oil sketches of the city, mainly on loan from private collections, as well as several of May\u2019s social scenes, including one deceptively placid painting of women knitting socks \u2013 for the soldiers of the First World War.<\/p>\n And then the show moves outside the city, to Suzor-Cot\u00e9’s portraits of the Mohawk residents of Kahnawake, their identities now lost to us, their deep faces rendered intelligently with neither romanticism nor stereotype by the artist. (In a signature Milroy touch, the show also includes a display of the beaded purses, pin cushions and little souvenir canoes that Kahnawake women would have taken into Montreal to sell.)<\/p>\n In Arthabaska, viewers are treated to Suzor-Cot\u00e9’s utterly modern painting of the Northern Lights, depicted as white fans across a dark sky. Morrice\u2019s much-loved view of the ferry crossing the river at Quebec City from the National Gallery\u2019s collection is matched with a whole series of the same subject by both Morrice and Pilot. And the show ends with Gagnon\u2019s\u00a0charming views of the area around Baie-Saint-Paul dating to the 1910s and \u201820s.<\/p>\n In the Beaupr\u00e9 region, views of haymaking by Morrice and Brymner are then juxtaposed with contemporaneous photographs by the American photographer Edith Watson. On the one hand, the painted and photographed images are sometimes direct matches, revealing that these paintings, which feel so romantic today, were actually quite observational.<\/p>\n On the other hand, the painters often edited out the most obvious sign of approaching modernity: the telegraph lines that were already in place in the 19th century. Only Gagnon truly celebrates the arrival of technology with\u00a0The Train, Winter\u00a0of 1914. The tension displayed at the start of this exhibition between picturesque Montreal and industrial Montreal holds true throughout.<\/p>\n Outside the bustling city, there are dozens of seductive rural scenes here, whose\u00a0luminous landscapes and nostalgic villages appeal so deeply to the settler. Quebec was settled earlier than Ontario, and its artists turned to pretty villages as much as stunning landscapes.<\/p>\n In displaying\u00a0Early Spring Morning in the Laurentian Wilds, one of the few mountain landscapes, the curators note that Gagnon knew nothing of the mysterious land beyond the fertile valley, the territory that belonged to Indigenous nations. If Quebec artists concentrated on their own settlements, Ontario artists looked mainly at the landscape itself: With little white settlement to interrupt it, the artists of the Group of Seven easily fell prey to the fallacy of the empty land.<\/p>\n The Quebec artists who brought Impressionism home from travels to France in the late 19th century were a large influence on the Group formed in 1920, particularly through A.Y. Jackson, the one member who was originally a Quebecker. And there are certainly moments here that make you ache for the disruption that is to come, paintings such as the fussy woodland scenes of Brymner or Ozias Leduc\u2019s\u00a0Green Apples, work\u00a0closer to France\u2019s earlier Barbizon school than Impressionism.<\/p>\n Impressionism is a word that sells tickets, and in an era where the canon is expanding, it is no longer reserved for a handful of French artists painting in the 1870s and 1880s. The\u00a0Canada and Impressionism<\/a>\u00a0show of 2022 at the National Gallery of Canada\u00a0really stretched the definition of Impressionism; this tightly focused collection is a more convincing argument for looking outside France.<\/p>\n River of Dreams continues at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., to Jan. 12.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>![](\"https:\/\/mcmichael.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/The-Wayside-Cross-Autumn_WEB.jpg\" "\\"The-Wayside-Cross,-Autumn_WEB\\"")
![\"painting](\"https:\/\/mcmichael.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Install-Covers_QC.jpg\" "\\"St.")
![\"group](\"https:\/\/mcmichael.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Knitting_WEB.jpg\" "\\"Knitting_WEB\\"")