This luminous winter pastel from circa 1913 reveals Marc-Aurèle Suzor-Coté at his most sensitive and atmospheric, transforming the maple grove at Edgewater Farm near Coaticook into a scene of quiet poetic stillness. Painted on the country property of his friends and patrons Harry and Helen Norton, the composition reflects the artist’s painterly intrigue with the fleeting effects of winter light. The tall maple trunks rise rhythmically through the foreground like natural columns, framing the distant cabin and drawing the eye gently inward along the snow-covered path.
Rather than depicting winter as harsh or monochrome, Suzor-Coté animates the snow with subtle blues, mauves, greens, and pale golds. The pastel medium allows him to soften contours and dissolve forms into atmosphere, creating a surface that feels almost crystalline in its delicacy. Long diagonal shadows stretch across the snow, suggesting the low sun of late afternoon, while the vibrant blue sky flickers through the bare branches with an Impressionist sensitivity to color and air.
This precise view of the maple grove at Edgewater Farm is one the artist is known to have explored in oils as well. There is a small oil sketch as well as a canvas format, the latter a well exhibited painting in the collection of Power Corporation. His connection to the Norton family and Edgewater Farm provided him with a cultivated rural retreat where art, hospitality, and nature converged.
In this composition, the solitude of winter is not bleak but contemplative. The small cabin or sugar shack in the distance introduces a discreet human presence within an otherwise expansive natural setting, reinforcing the sense of rural calm and intimacy that characterizes some of Suzor-Coté’s most evocative pastel landscapes.
Marc-Aurèle Suzor-Coté, Sugar Bush, Edgewater Farm, (L'érablière de la ferme d’Edgewater), 1913. Oil on canvas. 60 x 73 cm. Power Corporation of Canada Collection.
