With this diptych, Jacques Payette transforms a historic reception gown, once worn by the wife of Sir William Van Horne and borrowed from Montreal’s McCord Museum, into a vessel of memory. While the dress recalls the memories, a vanished world of wealth, hospitality, ceremony, human experience and the passage of time, Payette’s painting gives it new and contemporary experiences. In Les pas qui cherchent d’autres demeures (“The Footsteps Seeking Other Dwellings”), the gown seems to move through time in new homes: from house/mansion to museum, studio, canvas, and viewer’s imagination. In Les pas qu’on croise en attendant le jour (“The Footsteps We Carved While Waiting for Daybreak”), it becomes a figure of waiting, surrounded by invisible traces of the past, but now with a continued presence.

As is characteristic of the three outstanding paintings by Payette we are presently offering for your purchase, they are painted with encaustic and feature a richly layered surface. This serves to accentuate the effect of light on the garments. Payette paints history as both surviving and incomplete. About the artist, in 2023, Jean-François Bélisle, directeur du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, wrote, “In Jacques Payette’s work, the human figure is an exceptional vehicle for emotion.”

Jacques Payette is an artist whose career we have followed for the better part of 45 years. He has always been well and successfully represented by fine art galleries including Michel Tétreault, Drabinsky, Loch and Galerie de Bellefeuille. His paintings are represented in collections across North America, and in collections in Europe, the United Kingdom and in the Middle East. The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec has an important collection of Payette’s works. We have recently acted on purchase opportunities available in the secondary market and proudly offer these for your purchase.

Released recently is a two-volume publication, Jacques Payette : Artiste de l’intime et du temps qui passe (“Jacques Payette : Artist of Intimacy and the Passage of Time”), lavishly illustrated and brilliantly written by John R. Porter, a former Director General of Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. (As a personal note, I am inclined to suggest that John Porter is the finest and most accomplished director of a museum in Canada I have seen in my 50-year career.)