Œuvres d'art

As A.Y. Jackson’s niece, Naomi Jackson Groves, wrote in Works by A.Y. Jackson from the 1930s, “A.Y. Jackson’s life pattern as an artist shows a definite geographical and seasonal regularity, almost like a migratory bird, impelled by the forces of nature. Once he was able to settle down to paint full-time, and had found a certain territory that suited him, he tended to return there at the same season year after year, for a stretch of a decade or more.” [1] From 1921 to 1947, almost every late winter and early spring found the artist on the Lower Saint Lawrence. In 1921 Jackson painted at Rivière du Loup and Cacouna on the south shore and two years later he entered Clarence Gagnon territory in Charlevoix county, painting in and around Baie Saint Paul.

In his memoirs, Toronto dealer of yesteryear, Blair Laing, ranked A.Y. Jackson as one of his favourite artists. Of Jackson, he wrote: 

In my opinion, his most striking works are the colourful French-Canadian farm and village scenes of the 1920s and early 1930s. Picturesque, and painted in the Post-Impressionist style, which he learned in France, they are poignant reminders of the social and cultural significance of the Quebec rural communities of that time.Although not the first to paint the village life and farmsteads of Quebec (James W. Morrice, Clarence Gagnon, and to some extent Maurice Cullen and Horatio Walker, had painted similar subjects years before), Jackson with his sympathetic look at rural French Canada remains the best known.[2]

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Footnotes:

[1] Naomi Jackson Grove, Works by A.Y. Jackson from 1930s (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1990).

[2] G. Blair Laing, Memoirs of an Art Dealer, Volume 2 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1982), 197.