PROVENANCE
Galerie Bernard Desroches, Montreal
William B. Waite, CEO of Siemens, Montreal
By descent within the family to the present Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Laurier Lacroix, Suzor-Coté: Light and Matter, National Gallery of Canada and Musée du Québec, 2002, pages 178 and 209, reproduced page 217 and listed page 345

EXHIBITED
Musée du Québec, Quebec City, Suzor-Coté, 1869 – 1937: Light and Matter, October 10, 2002 – January 5, 2003, traveling to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, January 24 – May 11, 2003, titled as Thaw on the River, catalogue #91

Rivière au dégel (Thaw on the River) is an exquisite crystallization of Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté’s interest in capturing the wintry rivers winding through his hometown in the countryside of Arthabaska, Quebec. Suzor-Coté’s devotion to the dynamism of the Canadian winter was shared with his close friend Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who loudly promoted “the beauty, vastness, energy and exhilaration of a winter’s day when the ground is covered in a white mantle of snow as far as the eye can see…” This 1917 canvas was included in the artist’s most comprehensive retrospective to date, Light and Matter, terminating at the National Gallery of Canada. The exhibition’s curator, Laurier Lacroix, notes in the catalogue that “the immediacy of the view is accentuated by the framed detail of the landscape with form disintegrating under the large brush strokes.”

While other snowy river canvases by the artist from this period might have included skies, tree-lined shores or homes, this tight composition focuses exclusively on the moving water and the glistening ice crystals, standing out as uniquely spare and quasi-abstract within Suzor-Coté’s oeuvre. With fewer visual anchors, our eyes get lost in the warm sunlight raking across the sharp edges of the teal ice against the dark, undulating surface of the water. Thick, deliberate applications of paint act as a clock, just as in Claude Monet’s Haystacks series, communicating the precise colour effects and qualities of reflection particular to one time of day and season of the year.

If the painting gives the impression of a moment frozen in time, that might be partly credited to Suzor-Coté’s early adoption of a camera, which he frequently took with him on his painting trips. We know that black-and-white photos were used in the composition of his paintings in tandem with the Impressionist plein air techniques he adopted while in Paris, resulting in a conspicuous tension between flatness and depth. Rivière au dégel might be Suzor-Coté’s most modern painting, anticipating the incorporation of new technologies into our sensory faculties towards a new way of painting characterized by fields of pure colour, no longer dependent on illusory realism or optical perspective.

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