Winter on the North River captures nature's quiet transition of winter toward spring in this untouched area of the Laurentians. Maurice Cullen, Canada’s first plein air painter in oils and the first Canadian to introduce the concepts of Impressionism to the Canadian landscape, painted this oil sketch, a pochade, on the spot, the panel propped up on his sketch box, while out on his snow shoes, the thawing North River at his feet. “Snow borrows the colours of the sky and sun. It is blue. It is mauve. It is gray, even black but never entirely white,” Jean Chauvin quoted Cullen in 1928.[1] Here, with a heavy brush there is a kaleidoscopic of colours not only in his snow but also in Cullen’s description of the running river. 

Maurice Cullen’s paintings of Caché, Devil’s and North rivers in Quebec’s Laurentians near are as synonymous to Cullen’s oeuvre as Algonquin Park is to that of Tom Thomson.

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Footnotes: 

[1] Jean Chauvin, Ateliers (Montréal: L. Carrier, 1928), 28, quoted in Peter Mellen, “Maurice Cullen and the Group of Seven,” La Société La Vie des Arts 61 (1970): 28.