Œuvres d'art

A.Y. Jackson first painted on the Lower Saint Lawrence in late winter 1921. In mid-February, he started out at Rivière du Loup on the south shore, across the river from Tadoussac, then moved to nearby Cacouna, where he was joined by Albert Robinson. As Jackson recounted in his autobiography A Painter’s Country, “Someone told me about a farm below Rivière du Loup where the family took in boarders. Their name was Plourde, and their farm was a half mile from the St. Lawrence River, which here is about eighteen miles across. Below Rivière du Loup, the river remains open all winter, but big ice fields go up and down with the tides. The village of Cacouna, close to the river, was about two miles east of the Plourde farm. … To go about the country in the daytime, I used snowshoes. … At first in my painting, I was interested in the old farm houses, in the barns and the trees, Later it was snow that captured my attention; the sun and the wind continually changed its colour and texture. Towards spring there was slush and pools of water…After some weeks with the Plourdes I moved into the village of Cacouna….”

On the Saint Lawrence, March could have been painted near the Plourdes (Jackson always roamed far and wide on his snowshoes on these sketching expeditions) or near Cacouna. In spite of the central motif being the tree, the windblown whites of the snow, touched with strokes of pink, green, purple and yellow and the lovely blue shadows are the artist’s principal interest. The bare panel shows through between the brushstrokes like furrows created by the wind. As in other sketches painted by both Jackson and Robinson that spring, [1] the mauve hills and snow on the north shore, eighteen miles distant, appear much closer, but the floating ice on the deep blue water is very present. Might the brown form on the right be the roof of a cliff-side home?

This oil sketch has all the immediacy of Jackson’s best works and is highly evocative of his engagement with the landscapes of the Lower Saint Lawrence, a subject that would engage him for over twenty years. 

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 (2013). He became a member of the Order of Canada in 2000.

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Footnote: 

[1] See Jackson’s Cacouna in the Museums London, illustrated in Dennis Reid, The Group of Seven (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1970) page 174, and Spring – Lower Saint Lawrence, sold Joyner Fine Art, Toronto, 25 November 1986, lot 29. Albert Robinson’s Cacouna in the Art Gallery of Windsor is reproduced in Jennifer Watson, Albert Robinson: The Mature Years (Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, 1982) page 28, catalogue number 1, incorrectly as Baie –Saint-Paul.