PROVENANCE
Estate of the Artist
Continental Galleries, Montreal
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal
A.K. Prakash & Associates Inc., Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Canadian Section of Fine Arts, British Empire Exhibition, London, 1924, the related 1923 canvas A Laurentian Homestead listed page 14
A.K. Prakash, Canadian Art: Selected Masters from Private Collections, 2003, titled as Ice Harvest, Les Éboulements, reproduced page 129

EXHIBITED
British Empire Exhibition, London, Canadian Section of Fine Arts, April 23 – October 1924, the related 1923 canvas A Laurentian Homestead, catalogue #65

The above is a complete sketch entirely painted on the spot from nature. It ranks amongst the artist’s best winter sketches.

—Walter Klinkhoff (signed letter on verso)

Les Éboulements, Ice Harvest is one of two known sketches that document a remarkable canvas by Clarence Gagnon, A Laurentian Homestead (1923, private collection), which was presented at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park, London, in April 1924. Produced in the same year as the final composition, this painted sketch retains the immediacy of the artist’s first quick gestures. The landscape view originates from a sketch painted two years earlier, entitled Barn, Rang de Misère, Baie St. Paul (1921, in the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario).

Comparing these small formats of 1921 and 1923, we see that Gagnon replaced the old thatched barn of the first pochade with a typical French-Canadian farmhouse, with its gable roof, overlooking the hillside of the Rang de la Misère. The artist has saved from the initial sketch the low-angle view that gives two-thirds of the composition to the white mass of the sloping ground. Finally, he painted the background identically, which unfurls as two blue ribbons representing the forest and the distant peaks of the ancient Laurentian Mountains.

In his 1923 sketch, Gagnon included a scene of ice harvesting in the centre foreground that stands out for its unfinished character: a resident bends down to break the ice of the stream, accompanied by his horse, harnessed to the sleigh that will convey the ice harvest. Gagnon abandoned the idea of integrating this part of the sketch into his final painting, preferring to depict the slow return of the habitant, well wrapped up in his sleigh, pulled by his horse on the marked path of the farm, halfway between the foreground and the dwelling. As for the theme of ice harvesting, which had inspired the painter since his first stay in Charlevoix (1908 – 1909), he would later return to it, notably in one of the most decorative compositions from the end of his career: Ice Harvest, Quebec (1935, private collection).

In many ways, Les Éboulements, Ice Harvest testifies to the decorative direction that Gagnon's work would take after his fourth stay in Charlevoix (1919 – 1924). During this prosperous period of discovery—in particular the development from ground pigments of his own colours, which enlivened his compositions—the painter emancipated himself from the natural lighting of realist and Impressionist painting in favour of a more formalist and ornamental approach. Our sketch is a good illustration of this approach, which is far removed from the atmospheric effects that Gagnon nevertheless mastered successfully and that made him famous in Paris, London, Montreal and Toronto. Here, he manages to convey the comforting sensation of a haven of warmth in the cold of winter by his use of vibrating warm and cool colours, the vermilion orange of the farmhouse and the pile of wood contrasting with the indigo blue and light blue of the Laurentians.

To our knowledge, Les Éboulements, Ice Harvest was not included in exhibitions during the artist’s lifetime or after his death in 1942. Its provenance is well documented by Gagnon’s widow, Lucile Rodier, who affixed a certificate of authenticity to the back of the sketch during her inventory of the artist’s Paris studio collection in 1946. The work came out of the shadows in 2003, thanks to a reproduction in Canadian Art: Selected Masters from Private Collections, published in Toronto by art dealer A.K. Prakash.

We thank Michèle Grandbois, co-author of Clarence Gagnon, 1881 – 1942: Dreaming the Landscape, for contributing the above essay, translated from the French.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars