Additional Images

Provenance:

Artist's studio
Gift of the artist to a relative
By descent to the present Private Collection, Montreal, QC

Note:

From June to November 1911, Clarence Gagnon stayed in Italy for the third time. Upon his return to his Paris studio located at 9 rue Falguière, the painter wasted no time in transferring to canvas the impressions inspired by his visit to Assisi.[1]

As early as February 1912, Canadian art lovers could admire a view of the Monastery of St. Francis in Assisi at the Fifth Annual Exhibition of the Canadian Art Club in Toronto, and again, in March and April 1912, at the 29th Annual Spring Exhibition of Montreal. In April, at the Salon de la Société national des beaux-arts at the Grand Palais in Paris, Gagnon's painting on the same theme was noticed by French art critic Léon Saint-Valéry, who appreciated the sensations of “the peace of a soft morning of pale gold and transparent mists."[2]

The number of paintings by Clarence Gagnon with Assisi as the subject can be counted on one hand. In this respect, the recent appearance of Untitled (Assisi), 1911 on the Canadian art market is exceptional. This work had been kept hidden from public view in the artist's family for over a century.

The composition is exemplary of the impressionism and japonisme that permeated Gagnon's art during this period: the delicate treatment of light through lightly coloured notations, the bold, bird's-eye view of the monastery when the sun is at its zenith, and the plain of Assisi lost in the distance in atmospheric movements of blue, turquoise and pink, where sky and earth merge. To emphasize the vertiginous space, the painter has ensured that this blurring of forms contrasts sharply with the precision and verticality of the eight cypress trees in the foreground, which rise from the bottom to the top to form a majestic openwork decorative curtain.

[1] After Clarence Gagnon's visit, his compatriot, the painter A.Y. Jackson, traveled to Assisi in the winter of 1912-1913, as evidenced by Cypress Trees, Assisi, 1912 at the National Gallery of Canada.
[2] Salon de la Société nationale des beaux-arts, Revue des Beaux-arts (Paris), May 1912.

Contributed by Michèle Grandbois, Ph.D., independent researcher, writer and art historian. Michèle is the author of numerous monographs on Canadian artists including Clarence Gagnon, and Jean Paul Lemieux and is currently compiling a catalogue raisonné of the works of Jean Paul Lemieux.