PROVENANCE
Mr. and Mrs. François Dupré, Montreal
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 24, 2011, lot 121, reproduced front cover
Important Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Exposition rétrospective de Clarence A. Gagnon, RCA, 1881 – 1942, Musée de la province de Québec, 1942, listed page 8
Clarence A. Gagnon, RCA, LLD, 1881 – 1942, Memorial Exhibition, National Gallery of Canada, 1942, listed page 16

EXHIBITED
Musée de la province de Québec, Quebec City, Exposition rétrospective de Clarence A. Gagnon, RCA, 1881 – 1942, June 16 – July 16, 1942, catalogue #45, traveling to the Art Association of Montreal, August 7 – September 30, 1942, catalogue #45; Art Gallery of Toronto, October – November 1942, titled as Winter Landscape, catalogue #31; and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, November 1942 – January 1943, catalogue #22

In the late nineteenth century and during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Canadian painters presented snow scenes in the Paris Salons that enchanted visitors and collectors with a passion for northern exoticism. Their landscapes of various formats (from pochade to easel painting) are imbued with atmospheric sensations and shimmering reflections of light on the white surface of winter. These Québécois artists—Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Côté, Maurice Cullen, James W. Morrice and Clarence A. Gagnon—received their training in the “City of Light,” a must for aspiring North American painters. Being in Paris, the painters were exposed to different artistic movements happening at the time, but they were most inspired by Impressionism, which they applied to Canadian scenes such as rivers thawing in spring, the city under the snow, the crossing of the ferry in the river ice between Quebec City and Lévis, or the peaceful rural life nestled in the Laurentian Mountains in Baie-Saint-Paul.

Among the Quebec artists who are recognized today as masters of Canadian Impressionism, Gagnon spent half of his career in Paris, to which he remained deeply attached. Gagnon could be proud of having been the first Canadian painter to present a private exhibition on the Canadian winter in the capital of Western art. His work Paysages d’hiver dans les montagnes des Laurentides au Canada was on view at the A.M. Reitlinger Gallery, 12 rue de La Boétie, in November and December 1913. Photographs of the exhibition show the care taken to present the 75 paintings and sketches on the blue walls of the gallery, where the many predominantly white landscapes can be seen. The critical success of the exhibition encouraged the dealer Adrien M. Reitlinger to invite the Canadian painter to exhibit again the following year, but this time in an international group exhibition, Peintres de neige (The Snow Painters), in March 1914. Alongside artists from Belgium, Canada, the United States, France, the Netherlands and Poland, Gagnon presented two works on the subject of the Canadian winter.[1]

The beautiful painting Scène d’hiver, which is being auctioned this autumn, was possibly paired with a painting from the first exhibition at Reitlinger. It is known that once back in his Parisian studio, Gagnon was inspired by the many sketches he had produced in Canada to paint his easel paintings. We also know of large-format versions of the same subject to convey the qualities of the seasons, as the painter Maurice Cullen had done before him with the autumn landscape of L’Anse-des-mers (1904, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec) and its later winter variant Cape Diamond (1909, Hamilton Art Gallery). Gagnon did the same with La croix de chemin à l’automne (1916, National Gallery of Canada) and La croix de chemin en hiver (1916 – 1917, Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario).

Scène d’hiver offers another winter interpretation of the work entitled Evening Glow, Laurentians (Dernières lueurs) (1908 – 1913, private collection) that the painter selected for his solo exhibition at Reitlinger in 1913, a work that we were lucky enough to admire when it was auctioned by Heffel in November 2022 (lot 109). By comparing the two paintings of equivalent format, we can see that Scène d’hiver is far from the spontaneous character of Evening Glow, which is probably more in line with the sketch that would have served as its model (location unknown).

Indeed, the treatment of Scène d’hiver is more decorative, with its smooth and uniform surface dotted with accents of green, orange red, blue and pink. Several details distinguish the two scenes, but we can appreciate in Scène d’hiver the turbulent effect of the sky crowded with cumulus clouds and the fleeting pinkish light of an early spring illuminating the sloping fields around Baie-Saint-Paul.

We thank Michèle Grandbois, co-author of Clarence Gagnon, 1881 – 1942: Dreaming the Landscape, for contributing the above essay, translated from the French.

1. Le train en hiver and Scène d’hiver au Canada: The first painting is in the collection of Donald R. Sobey, the second could be our Scène d’hiver because of its title, but this remains hypothetical until we find a photograph of the hanging of Gagnon’s works in Peintres de neige.

This painting was previously held in the esteemed collection of Mr. and Mrs. François Dupré of Montreal, a treasure trove of Canadian art that included the most important names in Canadian Impressionism. Dupré was a hotelier, horse breeder and art collector. At one time he owned the prestigious Hotel George V, Paris and the Hotel Plaza Athenée, Paris. In addition, in 1947 he acquired the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal, where his Canadian Impressionist masterpieces were displayed until 1987.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars