PROVENANCE
Mr. Amiot Jolicoeur, Quebec
By descent to a Private Collection, Quebec
Galerie Claude Lafitte, Montreal, 2007
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 22, 2008, lot 88
Important Private Collection, Calgary

LITERATURE
Charles Miville-Deschênes, “The Vernissage of J.P. Lemieux. Donner à nos jeunes le goût du Vrai et du Beau,” Progrès du Saguenay, October 30, 1953, reproduced page 3
Gilles Corbeil, “Jean Paul Lemieux, peintre intimiste,” Arts et pensée, November – December 1953, reproduced page 41
National Film Board, Québec en silence, 1969, colour film by Jean Gascon, 10 min, presented at 8 min 53 sec
Anne Hébert, Jean Paul Lemieux, 1974, catalogue of the exhibition presented in Moscow, Leningrad, Prague and Paris, page 10
Guy Robert, Lemieux, 1975, reproduced page 91
Marie Carani, Jean Paul Lemieux, Musée du Québec, 1992, reproduced page 98, pages 101 and 270
François-Marc Gagnon, Borduas, Lemieux, Riopelle: Essays on Three Quebec Painters, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, 2014, illustrated page 102, discussed pages 103 –105

EXHIBITED
City Hall, Chicoutimi, Jean Paul Lemieux solo, October – November 1953, organized by the Arts and Crafts Committee of the Chicoutimi Chamber of Commerce
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Jean Paul Lemieux Retrospective, September 15 – October 11, 1967, traveling to the Musée du Québec, Quebec City, October 18 – November 22, 1967, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, December 6, 1967 – January 7, 1968, catalogue #25
Villa Bagatelle, Sillery, Horizons and Figures: A Jean Paul Lemieux Exhibition, October 7 – November 15, 1987
Musée du Québec, Quebec City, Jean Paul Lemieux, June 3 – November 1, 1992, traveling to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, June 17 – October 31, 1993, catalogue #24

I know of few works in our painting which reach poetry to such an extent by means so simple and at the same time so refined. Everything here contributes to create a poetic state: the subtlety of the tones, the strangeness of the subject and the composition, the originality of the material and above all, this tender melancholy that seems to float over objects as much as over living beings.

—Gilles Corbeil [1]

It is the Montreal aesthete, scholar and art dealer Gilles Corbeil (1920 – 1986) that is credited with revealing, in an article published in 1953, the “intimate” character of Jean Paul Lemieux’s painting. He illustrated his point with the magnificent painting Les servantes, which clearly differed from the colourful and voluble staging of the painter’s previous period (1940 – 1946), described as narrative for having highlighted the way of life of the Nordic religious people to which he belonged.[2] At the turn of the 1950s, after seriously questioning his future as a painter, Lemieux took up his brushes again and produced compositions of a completely different order, which Corbeil described as “poetic.”

Les servantes testifies to the new direction that Lemieux’s art was taking at this time, exploring themes of solitude, alienation, and his subjects’ inner worlds. The work presents a rare interior scene—described by François-Marc Gagnon as “a small hotel in Quebec City or elsewhere” [3]—whose space is articulated around rectangles formed by the wall sections, the window, the landings and the steps. We notice the rhythmic animation created by the vertical and oblique axes of the banisters, filled with a succession of spindles. The painter’s gestures, present everywhere on the surface, annihilate the effect of permanence of this brilliant geometric construction. From the quickly sketched vase of flowers to the light wall textured with brush-strokes that draws the shadow of the black-clad maid, it is the effect of transience that prevails. Each busy with her task, it seems to us that the two servants will soon escape from the frame of the painting.

An essential and well-documented work by Lemieux, Les servantes prefigures the themes of his classical period (1956 – 1970) that would make the painter famous by attempting to render on canvas the effect of time passing and the “quivering reflection of the soul of French Canada with its mysteries and its secrets.”[4]

We thank Michèle Grandbois, author of Jean Paul Lemieux aux Musée du Québec, for contributing the above essay, translated from the French. This work will be included in Grandbois’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

1. Gilles Corbeil, “Jean Paul Lemieux, peintre intimiste,” Arts et pensée, November – December 1953, 40.

2. Ibid., 36.

3. François-Marc Gagnon, Borduas, Lemieux, Riopelle: Essays on Three Quebec Painters (Vancouver: Heffel Fine Art Auction House, 2014), 103.

4. Paraphrase of Jean Paul Lemieux’s quote in Corbeil, “Jean Paul Lemieux,” 36: “The soul of French Canada has its mysteries and its secret: what attempt for us can have more charm than to fix its quivering reflection?”

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