Winter, Quebec, 1925 (circa)
Oil on panel
8 1/2 x 10 1/2 in
21.6 x 26.7 cm
21.6 x 26.7 cm
This painting is presently on view at our Toronto gallery
$22,000
Inscriptions
unfinished painting of possibly St. Malo, signed lower right, ‘Albert Robinson’ (verso)Provenance
Roberts Gallery Limited, Toronto
Walter Klinkhoff Gallery Inc., Montreal
Private collection, Calgary
This handsome sketch is a fine example of Albert Robinson’s gift for distilling Quebec’s late winter with a freshness of colour and sensitivity in his personal synthesis of French Post-Impressionist ideas. He is a “Painter’s Painter,” as his biographer called him. Cool lavenders, soft blues and subtle rose tones flicker through the winter ground, so that even the palest passages feel vibrant and alive, suffusing the whole scene with a gentle, luminous radiance.
Painted circa 1925, it shows an unidentified church in winter, conceivably in the Charlevoix area, although possibly on the St. Lawrence’s south shore, subjects and regions to which Robinson repeatedly returned. Robinson’s sketching trips to Charlevoix on the north shore and Bienville and beyond on the south were sometimes in the company of A.Y. Jackson, Robert Pilot, Edwin Holgate, Clarence Gagnon, Randolph S. Hewton, and Dr. Frederick Banting.
Robinson exhibited in the first Group of Seven exhibition in May 1920. He confided to my father, Walter Klinkhoff, that he, “simply could not share the philosophy of the others [in the Group of Seven]” and “did not feel compelled to paint the remote wilderness of Canada, but preferred those inhabited places, particularly the Lower Saint-Lawrence region.”
In this work, beyond the church, the landscape opens across an expanse of the St. Lawrence River to the distant hills of the opposite shore, lending the composition a remarkable sense of depth and reinforcing the quiet grandeur of the region.
(The distant background closely resembles that recognizable in La Malbaie, 1927, previously sold by Galerie Alan Klinkhoff and illustrated in G. Blair Laing, Memoirs of an Art Dealer, Vol. II, p. 125, McClelland and Stewart Press (1982).)
Albert Robinson R.C.A. (1881–1956) is one of Canada’s première artists of the Group of Seven and the Beaver Hall Group modernist era, and appropriately celebrated in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ touring exhibition 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group, which toured from October 2015 to January 2016.
The signed reverse is likely of a much earlier generation, we speculate, of that St-Malo work of around 1911. One can only hypothesize that a decade after he had completed the work, the artist elected to “recycle” the panel with which he was not entirely satisfied and bring it on a sketching trip.
Painted circa 1925, it shows an unidentified church in winter, conceivably in the Charlevoix area, although possibly on the St. Lawrence’s south shore, subjects and regions to which Robinson repeatedly returned. Robinson’s sketching trips to Charlevoix on the north shore and Bienville and beyond on the south were sometimes in the company of A.Y. Jackson, Robert Pilot, Edwin Holgate, Clarence Gagnon, Randolph S. Hewton, and Dr. Frederick Banting.
Robinson exhibited in the first Group of Seven exhibition in May 1920. He confided to my father, Walter Klinkhoff, that he, “simply could not share the philosophy of the others [in the Group of Seven]” and “did not feel compelled to paint the remote wilderness of Canada, but preferred those inhabited places, particularly the Lower Saint-Lawrence region.”
In this work, beyond the church, the landscape opens across an expanse of the St. Lawrence River to the distant hills of the opposite shore, lending the composition a remarkable sense of depth and reinforcing the quiet grandeur of the region.
(The distant background closely resembles that recognizable in La Malbaie, 1927, previously sold by Galerie Alan Klinkhoff and illustrated in G. Blair Laing, Memoirs of an Art Dealer, Vol. II, p. 125, McClelland and Stewart Press (1982).)
Albert Robinson R.C.A. (1881–1956) is one of Canada’s première artists of the Group of Seven and the Beaver Hall Group modernist era, and appropriately celebrated in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ touring exhibition 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group, which toured from October 2015 to January 2016.
The signed reverse is likely of a much earlier generation, we speculate, of that St-Malo work of around 1911. One can only hypothesize that a decade after he had completed the work, the artist elected to “recycle” the panel with which he was not entirely satisfied and bring it on a sketching trip.
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