The paintings of the three self-taught sisters from Baie Saint-Paul: Marie-Cécile (1920-1973), Edith (1924-?) and the most accomplished among them, Marie Simone (1912-1945) Bouchard. Marie-Cécile Bouchard's Two Sleighs Passing Cross (c.1935) and Marie Simone Bouchard's Le cheval blanc (The White Horse) (c.1935) contain all the elements of Primitive or Naïve painting: two-dimensionality, awkward perspective, a non-rational juxtaposition of intense colours, a dream-like quality and problematic draftsmanship. Yet they admirably capture the village life of the habitant that A.Y. Jackson has noted was "getting harder all the time for the artist to find." The Bouchard sisters became popular among anglo-Canadian and American art collectors because, as Arthur Lismer recalled, their work celebrated life in a part of the country "where the older, less sophisticated, simplicity remains." Their paintings on silk and and paper conformed to the Surrealist criteria that art should be the product of psychic automatism and thus be created outside the "repressive" traditions of European art. They also satisfied a feeling of nostalgia in many viewers eager to forget the grim industrial centres of North America. Not surprisingly, it was for these reasons that Marie Simone Bouchard was invited to join Montreal's Contemporary Arts Society, an organization that prided itself on bringing together artists who were in touch with modernist European thought. (Excerpt from By a Lady: Celebrating three centuries of art by canadian women by Maria Tippett)