It is reasonable to claim that Professor Sandra Paikowsky C M, the previous owner of Flora in a Red River Coat, is the foremost Goodridge Roberts scholar. In an exhibition catalogue about Goodridge Roberts’ figure works, Professor Sandra Paikowsky wrote that whereas his norm as a model for his figures was his wife Marian, “ In the early 1940's Roberts produced an unusual series of figures using adolescents as models…… His subjects, Ian (b. 1928), Flora (b. 1929) and Archie (b. 1931) were the children of his cousin the journalist Cuthbert MacDonald. Roberts once remarked that he "liked the children and they seemed to be always very friendly to me," and when they were in the studio, "their best qualities were shown and I felt much more aware of them as people to whom I had a feeling of warmth." [1]

[...] But his paintings of children are characterized by an almost elegant drawing. A clear, supple line models the form with a combination of delicacy and forcefulness appropriate to the subject. In earlier pictures, the drawing is more generalized in the service of a massive sculptural treatment of form. Now line becomes more descriptive without losing any of its plasticity.

[...] In Roberts' pictures of adolescents, the setting is often more circumstantial than is usual for him in this period. Frequently, the figure is framed by a variety of rectangular shapes. The flattened back- ground and the angling of the body into space insures the subtle dominance of the figure. Roberts has said "I have to think of the wall behind the figure as something as almost as important as the thing itself... although I find that I drastically change the colour of these various parts."

[...] The model stands or rests in quiet self-containment. Yet there is often the sense that in the pictures of children, Roberts sought for an image that expresses the dignity of adolescence. His special attachment to his young cousins caused "a radical difference in my approach to them as models from my approach to the professional model." The directness and resonance of the children pictures again comes from a close identification with the subject:

I like to paint young people... ones who have as yet retained their grace, with a quality of both the skeleton and the young flower about them; before they have filled out and settled into solid citizens, or have become types, whether of success or failure. [2]

“Flora MacDonald Cross in conversation with the author [Professor Sandra Paikowsky] said that Roberts selected their costumes, positioned them "like still-lifes" and paid them 25¢ an hour modelling fees.
[Cuthbert] MacDonald's mother Mary and Roberts' father Theodore were brother and sister. The MacDonald and Roberts families had also intermarried earlier. Cuthbert wrote for The Montreal Herald and The Standard.” [3]


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Footnotes:

[1] Sandra Paikowsky, Goodridge Roberts: The Figure Works (Montreal: Concordia Art Gallery, 1984), 10.
[2] Ibid., 13.
[3] Ibid., 28.