Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

Clarence Gagnon (1881-1942) spent five years in Baie St. Paul, Quebec from 1919-1924. He had spent time painting in the region before, but he returned this time with a renewed approach to materials and matrimony. In June 1919, he married his second wife Lucile Rodier, whose labels affixed to the reverse of Gagnon’s little pochades are a mark of authenticity and have served scholars and collectors well in the identification of both date and place of execution of her husband’s work.

While Baie St. Paul remained a rural and somewhat isolated place, certainly in contrast with Montreal, which had been Lucile’s hometown, or Paris where Gagnon had been living on and off since 1904, the newlyweds enjoyed the company of many fellow painters while there. They were houseguests of Horatio Walker, with whom they stayed while on honeymoon, and once they settled into their own place, welcomed guests of their own. Among the many friends who came to call were A.Y. Jackson, Randolph Hewton, Mabel May, Edwin Holgate, Albert Robinson and Lilias Torrance Newton.

Around 1919, Gagnon began experimenting with various painting techniques which involved grinding his own pigments, having become disenchanted with commercial preparations which he refused to use. Art historian Hélène Sicotte notes that this involved “a considerable investment of time and energy” but allows that it was demonstrably worth it because paintings from this period “are notable for their vivacity and purity of colours”.[1]

While atmosphere is not completely absent from pictures from this period, the air is often noticeably crisper. It is clear that Gagnon metabolized the comments of British critics, who in 1910 had chided Canadian painters who had participated in a Liverpool exhibit for picturing their country through the filter of a European lens, urging them instead to develop their own approach to painting by “throwing off the yoke of (foreign) influence”.

As A.K. Prakash notes of the works from the 1919-1925 Baie St. Paul period, with their vivid colours “applied with smooth, even brushstrokes, increasingly in blocks and patches”, that “it was this difference that belonged exclusively to his hand and went beyond the formulae of the French post-Impressionists.”[2]

[1] A.K. Prakash, Impressionism in Canada: A Journey of Rediscovery, Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart, Germany, 2014, page 583.
[2] Hélène Sicotte and Michèle Grandbois, Clarence Gagnon, 1881-1942: Dreaming the Landscape, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2006, pages 102, 136, 150, 152, 156, and 338.