Provenance:

Dr. Elliott Emanuel, Montreal.
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal.
Private Collection, Ontario.

Literature:

“Musings: A Canadian Painter”, Canadian Medical Association Journal,
Ottawa, November 19, 1977, pages 204-205.

Note:

One of the principal themes of Montreal’s Samuel Borenstein was that of scenes painted in the Laurentians, bursting with energy and colour. In this arresting work, Borenstein obviously relished a subject that could be painted to look at the same time recognizable and timeless. His treatment of paint and handling of gouache almost like oil, forays into abstraction. Borenstein always teetered on the edge of abstraction and never more so than here. However, at the same time, the artist took lessons from one of the great European “isms,” Expressionism, applying its bright, sometimes arbitrary colour and slashing brushwork to portray the figure, urban buildings and roads, trees, mountains and sky.

Stormy Landscape with Farmhouse was once part of the private collection of Dr. Elliott Emanuel, a friend and admirer of Borenstein’s work. In November of 1977, Emanuel contributed Musings: A Canadian Painter to the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the doctor displaying his deep appreciation for Borenstein’s work throughout the article, exclaiming, “His pictures are so powerful that they are difficult to hang beside the work of others, though a roomful has a blazing authenticity.”

Stormy Landscape with Farmhouse is one of his most dashing and important works, and its bold way with images – a kind of loaded nonchalance – makes it something of an apocalyptic anthem. It was one of the works which appeared in the film on Borenstein by his daughter, Joyce Borenstein, The Colours of My Father: A Portrait of Sam Borenstein (1992).

We would like to thank art historian, Joan Murray, for contributing the foregoing essay.