Self: Canadian and Russian Landscape Painting (1860 – 1940)

Between 1860 and 1940, Russia and Canada had radically different cultural and artistic environments. Literature, theatre, music, ballet and the visual arts reached new heights in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, due to enlightened patronage. In Canada, although there was some emerging activity in the 1860s, the development of the arts was more modest because artists were still marginal figures in a society that was essentially concerned with its economic growth.

Nonetheless, the painters of both countries were driven by the desire to represent the local landscape and to highlight its special characteristics. Their works reflected the importance of landscape in Russian and Canadian identity. Their modes of representation gradually cast off outside influences. The painters focused mainly on rural scenes yet cityscapes sometimes drew their attention, attesting to changing lifestyles and their subsequent effect on the architectural environment.

This "national" affirmation went through a variety of phases. In Russia, from the very first travelling exhibition of itinerant artists known as the Wanderers in 1871, artists asserted their intention to reject foreign painting conventions. Later, other painters would draw inspiration from Russian popular culture in order to arrive at a new form of art. In Canada, as early as the 1870s, the Luminist painters adopted a more American perspective on painting. At the end of the nineteenth century, some artists adapted Impressionist techniques to conditions specific to Canada. In the 1920s, the Group of Seven were taken with the uncharted wilderness, leading to a distinctive image of the Canadian landscape.

Logging in Winter, Beaupré was one of the first paintings to apply the adapted techniques of Impressionism to the Canadian landscape. Maurice Cullen went on numerous sketching trips in Beaupré, outside of Québec, with contemporaries such as William Brymner, James W. Morrice, and Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté. Cullen was fascinated with the effects of light as reflected off snow, ice and water, and the range of resulting colours and hues. The palette is close to that of the French Impressionists, but the forms are solid and he blends his colours masterfully. The surface is layered with a thick impasto in the sun-kissed snowy areas, and a blue light is cast in the shaded area.

Capturing the blinding whiteness of snow and the violet-tinted shadows of a Canadian winter, Morrice presents a slightly elevated view of the main street in a Quebec village. This painting also reveals how attached this great traveller was to his homeland, which he visited regularly at Christmas. During his extended stay in France, Morrice discovered Impressionism—an influence that is detectable in this landscape. Winter landscapes were of particular interest to the Impressionist painters, notably Claude Monet. However, depicting the Canadian winter was substantially more difficult than representing the snow that surrounded Vétheuil or Argenteuil, to the North of Paris. Morrice and his friend and colleague Maurice Cullen were among the first to successfully meet the challenge of painting the distinctly Canadian winter landscape.

Morrice returned to Canada in the fall of 1896 after painting in Brittany during the summer of that year. While visiting the Beaupré shore not far from Québec in January 1897, he met the painter Maurice Cullen, a native of Newfoundland. After seeing Cullen’s work and being impressed by the striking light used in depicting Canada’s winter landscape, Morrice brightened up his palette of colours. On this trip to the City of Québec area, the artist painted two canvases, one of which was a night scene showing the Québec Citadel. Although the Citadel was often painted by North American painters throughout the nineteenth century, Morrice’s intent was to create a striking effect of light, contrasted with the addition in the foreground of red and black dabs of colour. The rather modern approach to the painting has the artist distancing himself from the rather imposing Citadel in order to integrate it more naturally by superimposing other registers in the work.

Though James Wilson Morrice spent most of his professional life in France, he produced this painting, along with two other studies, during a Christmas visit to his family in Canada. The three sketches would serve as the basis for a later canvas, The Ferry, Quebec, painted in 1907 and exhibited at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Morrice often portrayed views of the St. Lawrence River; in the distance can be seen the snow-covered headland and spires of Québec. The warm tones of the bare wood support are visible throughout this landscape, contrasting with the pearly blue-grey of the painted river. The artist noted in a letter to Edmund Morris: “We have had cold weather 30 below zero. Difficult to work out of doors—paint gets stiff.” The sketches may in fact have been painted indoors.

Ludger Larose studied art in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, as did several of his Quebec colleagues. When he returned to Canada after his studies, he divided his time between teaching and painting. In this view of Saint-Faustin, in the Laurentian Mountains to the north of Montréal, the painter gives us a picturesque landscape of a typical French-speaking, Catholic Quebec village. The painting is original because the artist accurately depicts the village houses in their rural setting, on both sides of the main street. At the heart of this small group of houses is the parish church, whose steeple reaches skyward, dominating a harmonious landscape.