Collines au coucher du soleil, Charlevoix, 1923

Oil on panel

6 1/4 x 9 1/4 in
15.9 x 23.5 cm

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View in a Room

This painting is presently on view at our Toronto gallery

$30,000

Inscriptions

signed with the artist's thumbprint (verso, upper right); titled, dated, numbered, and certified by Lucile Rodier Gagnon, ‘Collines au coucher du / soleil. (Charlevoix) 1923. / 147 / Lucile Rodier Gagnon.’ (verso, Clarence A. Gagnon Inventory label)

Provenance

Estate of the Artist

Mrs. Lucile Rodier Gagnon, widow of the Artist

Private collection, Toronto

Literature

Hélène Sicotte et al., Clarence Gagnon, 1881-1942 : Dreaming the Landscape (Québec: Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, 2006), 116.

Clarence Gagnon painted Collines au coucher du soleil, Charlevoix, from a shaded foreground looking outward over a valley toward the opposing hillside, still bathed in the magnificence of Gagnon’s late afternoon sunlight. This can only be somewhere in the valley of the Gouffre River, maybe a view toward St-Urbain. The “delicious” autumnal reddish-oranges are synonymous with his palette. Clarence Gagnon is best celebrated for his winter and autumn paintings of the picturesque Charlevoix County, located on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, northeast of Quebec City. After World War I, having become dissatisfied with the quality of paint commercially available, Gagnon began to make his own pigments. Throughout the period 1919-1924, Gagnon stayed in Baie St Paul, Charlevoix and occasionally in Montreal when he arguably painted his most powerful legacy.