This 1960 painting by John Little, of St-Gabriel Street at Rue des Zouaves in Québec City, is a superb example of the artist’s lively and rhythmic urban paintings of this vintage. He records a lived-in, working-class neighbourhood—shops, pedestrians, snowbanks, telephone poles—not idealized but vibrant and as a witness to the day documenting urban life before modernization altered these districts.

The façades, windows, the sky, and the street with twisting tire tracks are described with loose, sweeping strokes animating the scene with a movement and energy characteristic of the best of Little’s paintings of the early 60s. With the lyricism of Little’s style he still approaches the street with a sense of historical preservation.