Additional Images

Provenance:

Atelier Janos Lukacs, Montreal, QC;
Collection of H. Myles and Elizabeth Morton, Belleville, ON;
By descent to Private Collection, Cobourg, ON

Note:

No other Canadian painter matches Cornelius Krieghoff’s diverse and drolly indifferent views of life. Exemplary, “A Spill on the Road”, portrays wintertime merriment and mishaps in nineteenth century Quebec with a gentle twist. Few examples of this theme were catalogued by the pioneering Krieghoff scholar Marius Barbeau in his 1934 catalogue raisonné, and more than a generation later Krieghoff’s second major scholar, J. Russell Harper, counted only four examples of overturned sleighs in his summary catalogue of Krieghoff’s work.

“A Spill on the Road” is accented by three fine examples of the motif in The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The same rustic berline-barque appears in “Run Off the Road in a Blizzard” (ca. 1861) while “A Winter Incident” (ca. 1860) shows a couple riding comfortably in their berline-barque that just ran a sleigh of logs into a ditch. “Off the Road – The Upset Sleigh” (ca. 1856) echoes “A Spill on the Road” down to the choreography of the sleigh’s occupants, the horse, and pig. Like Krieghoff’s majestic paintings of merrymaking that renewed—not repeated— themes, this similarly small group of works epitomizes his ability to renew compositions and compound their humanity.

It is folly to see Krieghoff’s paintings as records of events in nineteenth century Quebec. Nonetheless, much is revealed by a closer look at a painting made more than a century and a half ago. The overturned berline-barque disgorges its driver in a blue cloth coat, and a young couple dressed in fur coats. The young man drenched in snow tumbles onto his back, and she is athwart the beleaguered driver who pinned the pig in his fall. Behind them, a farmer settles the enraged horse foundering in snow after it veered right and snapped the left shaft of its harness. The woman’s errant mitten points to the pig’s tracks leading from the farmhouse to the accident scene to make it clear: the pig did it. Despite the calamity, she beams at us, rolling atop the driver, tugging his hair, her petticoats and stockings revealed, and ready for another go.

Gregory Humeniuk is an independent art historian, writer and curator who has researched and published aspects of Canadian and international art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, as well as cultural policy and governance. Through fifteen years at the Art Gallery of Ontario he dealt with Canadian and European historical, modern, and contemporary art. We thank him for contributing this essay.