Sold for: $31,250

PROVENANCE
Galerie Claude Lafitte, Montreal
Private Collection, Quebec

LITERATURE
Hélène Sicotte and Michèle Grandbois, Clarence Gagnon, 1881 - 1942: Dreaming the Landscape, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2006, page 22, the 1916 canvas titled The Wayside Cross, Autumn, collection of the National Gallery of Canada, reproduced page 139 and the 1916 / 1917 canvas titled The Wayside Cross, Winter, collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, reproduced page 131, and both works listed page 350

EXHIBITED
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, Clarence Gagnon, 1881 - 1942: Dreaming the Landscape, June 7 - September 10, 2006, traveling in 2006 - 2007 to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, the 1916 canvas titled The Wayside Cross, Autumn, collection of the National Gallery of Canada, catalogue #73 and the 1916 / 1917 canvas The Wayside Cross, Winter, collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, catalogue #75

From March 1915 to November 1916, Clarence Gagnon lived in Baie-Saint-Paul in the county of Charlevoix, where he strengthened his ties with the warm and supportive inhabitants of that town. He had a pattern of alternating sojourns in Paris with time spent in his home province of Quebec, and the North Shore community of Baie-Saint-Paul and its surrounding rural countryside in the Laurentian Mountains became an important part of his oeuvre. Although in 1916 and 1917 Gagnon was experiencing personal tribulations and economic difficulties due to the continuation of World War I, he produced some major canvases during these years, including The Wayside Cross, Autumn (collection of the National Gallery of Canada, figure 1), and The Wayside Cross, Winter (collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and winner of the 1917 Jessie Dow Prize, figure 2), another version of the same scene in winter, with the addition of a horse-drawn sledge with logs. Gagnon often painted works with similar subjects—variations on a theme. This important small sketch, on which both canvases are based, contains most of the motifs of the large paintings. When painting this pochade, the artist captured the significant elements of the scene in compressed form, his impressions executed en plein air, with sure and fluid brush-strokes.

Wayside crosses are a legacy of Quebec’s past. The first crosses were erected by Jacques Cartier to claim territory for the French. Later they were built for various other purposes, such as to mark the founding of a village or a church, to stand as a symbol of protection for farmers’ fields, or to designate a place where people would gather for evening prayers. Primarily religious objects, and the anchors of rural villages and surrounding countryside, they are symbols of French-Canadian faith and heritage, and around 3,000 of them still stand in Quebec.

The Wayside Cross, Charlevoix is a beautiful pochade. Gagnon’s palette is luscious, with both warm tones in the sky and cool hues in the land. The background is intriguingly abstract, painted with soft, amorphous brush-strokes of cream, mauve, orange and peach, like towering cumulus clouds of colour floating behind the foreground cross and houses. In the canvases, the backgrounds consist of a flat plain backed by mountains and a soft dappled sky, suggestions of which can be picked out in the pochade. Gagnon was also a master at depicting light, and the foreground, with its icy blues and greens, glows against the warm background with its reflected sunlight. The Wayside Cross, Charlevoix oozes atmosphere and expresses, as Michel Collot wrote, “the second sight that is the imagination, in a kind of dream-seeing.”

All prices are in Canadian Dollars