John Geoffrey Caruthers Little

John Little’s winter scenes have become a visual autobiography of Quebec’s and its people. Winter gave Little both atmosphere and structure: snowbanks defined the geometry of sidewalks, roofs, and streets, while a grey or milky sky threw facades into relief. He was fascinated by how people adapt to the cold, showing children trudging in heavy coats, adults carrying bags through slush, buses and cars leaving brown tracks in packed snow, laundry still hanging in backyards despite freezing weather – and of course, that most Canadian of games – hockey.

The skating rink was a particular cultural touchstone for Little and his generation. “His lifelong love of sports fuelled an ambition to play for the Canadiens, but a stronger talent for drawing took him down a path that bypassed the Forum and led to the Art Association of Montreal (now Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), where he studied under three of Canada’s most venerated painters — Arthur Lismer, Anne Savage and Goodridge Roberts.”[1]

The artist painted several hockey scenes, which he imbued with a feeling of immediacy. One viewer noted that “he felt as if he had been there and that he could lace up his skates and walk into it.”[2] From impromptu shinny games in Montreal’s laneways to more maintained rinks, Little believed these hockey scenes were integral to his “family album” of a disappearing Quebec. In Little’s words, “I loved hockey, but it’s a hard thing to paint except if you isolate a little rink in the back yard, these little homemade rinks made out of old doors for the boards and old signs and stuff, and one little light bulb hung in the back. The big game is more difficult to make it work.”[3]

Little’s gallerist, Alan Klinkhoff, noted that Little’s hockey paintings “became popular for fashionable homes only a couple of decades after Little first began painting them. This popularity was the reason for Little to compose them only rarely. For other artists more commercially oriented than Little, it became a reason to paint them repetitiously.”[4] As such, collectors will enjoy the opportunity to own one of these iconic hockey scenes.

[1] National Gallery of Canada, in. https://www.canadianartgroup.com/historical-artists/john-little/
[2] Alan Klinkhoff, John Little: City Life From 1951 (Alan Klinkhoff Gallery: Toronto, 2017), 42.
[3] ibid, 60.
[4] ibid, 51.