Additional Images

Provenance:

Commissioned by Toller Cranston, Toronto, ON;
Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:

Mérike Weiler, "Grand Illusions," City & Country Home, Dec. 1986, illustrated p. 87-89

Note:

Louis de Niverville became a sensation in the Canadian art world soon after his arrival in
Toronto in 1957. His first exhibitions sold out at Barry Kernerman’s Gallery of Contemporary
Art and his pitch-perfect drawings formed the basis of many charmingly counter-culture
animated films broadcast on CBC TV. These small-scale works made him one of the best-known
artists in the country. Yet he had previously worked in theatre set design and often returned to
this scale throughout his long and celebrated career.

Le roi s’amuse, commissioned by the figure skater Toller Cranston for his Cabbagetown
home, is only the second large-scale de Niverville commission to have come to market. Unlike
his 1974 mural-sized work for the Fifth Avenue penthouse of the American investment banker
and collector, Patrick Lannan (currently in the collection of the Dennos Museum Centre,
Michigan) Le roi s’amuse makes its patron central to its imagery. Cranston is depicted as
Louis XIV, the immortal Sun King known by his contemporaries not only for his genius as a
patron of the arts and fashion but also for the eighty roles he performed in forty major ballets.

Cranston in a royal blue gilt and ermine coronation robe opposite his renowned coach, Ellen
Burka, her red dress a beautiful cloud of pigment and soft edges, are the main attractions.
Around them, star-struck courtiers, aristocratic visitors, a jester and hovering putti converge over
ice as perfect and mirror-like as the surface of a still pond. Notable on this court’s stage are
Burka’s daughters, Petra – a world champion skater and Olympic silver medalist – bowing, and
Astra executing a flippant turn. The stage is bordered by a heavy wood frame which turns the
scene into a massive painting beneath which sit children, dolls, a dog and other affecting riffraff
with their attentions turned toward each other or outward at some unknown spectacle. The whole
work is a lively rococo scene, a unique and knowing synthesis of Fragonard and Diego Rivera. It is also a grand piece of theatre painted with a delicateness of paint application unique to de Niverville.

Taking his friend, Cranston, as subject – one of the world’s great skaters whose use of modern
dance, ballet and theatrical costume changed the world of competitive skating – de Niverville
shares in the post 1967 Canadian cultural confidence and with Le roi s’amuse makes it enduringly tangible and deeply pleasurable.

E.C. Woodley is a critic and curator who is currently writing a Louis de Niverville monograph.