Artworks

A.Y. Jackson, Sun Gleams Near Bic
by Charles C. Hill

A.Y. Jackson’s niece, the scholar Dr. Naomi Jackson Groves, had a special affection for the landscape around Bic, with its “sudden outcrops of rock that form the characteristic razor-backed humps of nearly all the hills and islands along the South Shore east of Ste. Anne de la Pocatière, reaching their climax at Bic with its beautiful bay and rich history.” In Sun Gleams near Bic the humped islands and beautiful bay effectively evoke the source of Naomi Groves’ affections.

A native Montrealer, Jackson’s exploration of Quebec’s many landscapes began in the years preceding the First World War, but he only began painting on the Lower Saint Lawrence in 1921. The villages and hills of the north and south shores became sites of almost annual sketching expeditions for over two decades.

Jackson first painted at Bic in the spring of 1927 with Dr. Frederick Banting. Bic, now part of the municipality of Rimouski, is located on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence, just west of Pointe-au-Père (Father Point), whose lighthouse Lawren Harris would draw and paint in 1929. From the nearby village of Tobin, Jackson wrote to Clarence Gagnon in Paris on 20 March 1927, “The south shore is more sophisticated generally than the north, less intimate, less color. It depends more on its contours and big spaces. It needs canvases. It’s too intricate for sketching.” (Clarence Gagnon papers, McCord Museum, Montreal)

An oil sketch titled The Bic Road in the National Gallery of Canada (6961), dated by the artist March 1935, documents a return visit that month and Jackson exhibited a canvas titled The Road to Bic with the Ontario Society of Artists in March 1936 (sold Joyner, Toronto, 21 November 1997, lot 51). When shown in Boston in 1949, Sun Gleams near Bic was dated 1937 in the catalogue and was probably worked up from a currently unlocated oil sketch of 1935.

Jackson has viewed the river from the height of a hill overlooking the expansive landscape. As seen in several Jackson canvases of Charlevoix from the late 1920s and 1930s, a sinuous road leads from the centre foreground, with a sleigh descending towards the houses nestled along the shore. The eastern morning sun shines on the island upper right and casts sun gleams of purple, pink and yellow across the frozen water, animating and emphasizing the middle ground. Characteristic Jacksonian rolling islands crown the composition below the grey sky. Open water is glimpsed upper left.

On several occasions A.Y. Jackson’s paintings were exhibited at the important Watson Art Galleries in Montreal in the 1930s. The gallery’s proprietor, William R. Watson, acquired this painting for his personal collection and it was selected by Donald Buchanan for reproduction in his book The Growth of Canadian Painting, in 1950.

Charles C. Hill

Charles C. Hill was Assistant, then Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada from 1972 to 2014. He has organized numerous exhibitions, including Canadian Painting in the Thirties (1975) and The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation (1995),  and was co-organizer of Tom Thomson (2002), Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (2006) and Artists, Architects, Artisans: Canadian Art 1890-1918. He became a member of the Order of Canada in 2000.