PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the Artist by a Private Collection, Toronto, November 1968
By descent to the present Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Forces (Hydro-Québec), no. 10, 1970, reproduced

The passage of time is a favourite theme for the painter Jean Paul Lemieux. He returned to it again and again during his period of maturity, known as the classic period (1956 to 1970): the time of remembrance; the ages of life—childhood, maturity, old age; the hours of the day; even time in motion. Let us remember the famous paintings in which Lemieux depicts himself as a child in the gardens of the Kent House Hotel on the promontory of the Montmorency Falls, near Quebec City. It was there that he discovered painting in 1910. The times of human life are an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him.

Lemieux is also animated by the successive times of the day, whose deep sensations he carefully translates from the daytime and nighttime lights in the northern space of his country. The artist is attentive to the effects of time on the space around us in many of his works, such as The Evening Visitor and The Noon Train (both 1956, in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada), or Death on a Clear Morning (1963, collection of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec), and Orion Nocturne (1968, private collection). The time of day is mainly associated with one or several characters. Lemieux’s landscape painting is eminently humanist.

The appearance on the market of Le petit matin, painted in 1968, reminds us that not everything has been said about the painter’s remarkable classical production. The work remained out of the spotlight for more than half a century at the home of the first Toronto collector who acquired it. The only known foray into the public sphere was a reproduction in the Quebec magazine Forces in 1970. Yet the story of its provenance is very well documented thanks to the collector’s account of their meeting with the artist, which was recounted with emotion. It took place at the beginning of November 1968, in Lemieux’s Quebec City studio.[1]

Lemieux confided that he could have called this work The Hunter, but that he had preferred the typically French expression petit matin to emphasize the effects of daylight at dawn: “He said that Petit Matin was difficult to translate into English … that it is a term used in French very often because it is a sight that you see.” And paraphrasing the artist: “The only way you can express it is by saying you feel the quietness. You just see the light breaking. It just shimmers through the trees. There is a bit of breeze that just causes the trees to pull a little. It is a very quiet time. It is the time the trappers get out to their traps in the winter.… They have to walk miles and miles of traps.”

In this serene early morning landscape, the sky is tinted with pastel colours that the painter has applied with finesse by means of soft, superimposed brush-strokes. The light filters through the bare trees rocked by the breeze. The pristine snow patch is dotted with bluish hues that shimmer under the changing sky. Warmly wrapped up, the figure in the foreground has his back to this wild nature at the hour when the day is brightening. The painter has made the figure enigmatic by placing it against the light and in the cold of dawn, by attributing no clue to it to better define it. Luckily, the collector’s account clarifies the mystery: “M. Lemieux envisioned the hunter carrying a gun but he didn’t get it into the painting. The hunter is there to give this solitary feeling—the person is alone. We are all alone … all of us—even though we are communicating with people—we are alone.”

In 1968, the year that Le petit matin was executed, Lemieux was 64 years old. He was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) and appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada (CC). In 1967, his work was part of the celebrations marking the centennial of Canadian Confederation. A first major retrospective of 108 paintings was organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which toured to the Musée du Québec (now MNBAQ) and the National Gallery of Canada. The year 1968 also saw Guy Robert’s first monograph on this singular artist, whose work radiated in Canada and abroad from his native Quebec City.

We thank Michèle Grandbois, author of Jean Paul Lemieux au Musée national des beaux-arts 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. The quotations in this text come from the five-page typescript written by the collector after their visit to Lemieux’s home on November 7, 1968. The author warmly thanks the estate of the collector for agreeing to share this precious documentation.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars