Certified to verso by Lucile Rodier Gagnon, Gagnon Inventory no. 417, 1946
Provenance
Collector’s Gallery, Montreal, 1971;
Private estate, Winnipeg;
Sale of Heffel Fine Art, May 28, 2014, lot 127;
Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary;
Private collection, Calgary;
Private collection
In the spring of 1905, Clarene Gagnon and his friend Edward Boyd would travel to Italy, where they would spend most of their time in Venice. Their trip was on the heels of an expensive autumn stay in France, in which Gagnon had struggled to find models with his limited income, and in which he “felt that he was not accomplishing very much”. Venice, it seems, was much more productive. According to Gagnon’s biographer, Rene Boissay, he returned from his trip with four panels and ten engravings.
Vue de Jardins Publics, Venice is possibly one of these four panels that Boissay references. Gagnon added the finishing touches to the fourteen Venice works in his studio in France that winter.
Pictured in the panel is mostly likely the pathway that wraps around The Biennale Gardens, the Viale Giardini Pubblici. Gagnon also produced an etching of these gardens, in the collection of the
National Gallery of Canada. Boissay notes Gagnon’s Japanese influence, particularly notable in his etchings. We can see this in Vue de Jardins Publics in the positioning and details of the tree, arching
over the top from the right of the panel, as is a tradition held in the long history of Japanese printmaking.
Clarence Gagnon is best known for his rural Quebec landscape paintings and the illustrations for Louise Hémon’s novel Maria Chapdelaine. Gagnon was also an award winning printmaker, a passionate outdoorsman, and an active promoter of Quebec handicrafts. Clarence Gagnon was born in a small village in rural Quebec. Although he…
Clarence Gagnon is best known for his rural Quebec landscape paintings and the illustrations for Louise Hémon’s novel Maria Chapdelaine. Gagnon was also an award winning printmaker, a passionate outdoorsman, and an active promoter of Quebec handicrafts.
Clarence Gagnon was born in a small village in rural Quebec. Although he trained and maintained a studio in Paris for much of his career, he never lost his love of the Laurentians and the Charlevoix region of eastern Quebec which inspired many of his paintings. Gagnon’s mother fostered his early interest for drawing and despite his father’s wishes that he enter business, he began studying drawing and painting in 1897 at the age of sixteen under William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal.
Gagnon’s early paintings of rural themes attracted the interest and subsequent patronage of the Montreal businessman and collector James Morgan. With a monthly stipend from Morgan, Gagnon was able to travel to Europe to study at the Académie Julian, Paris, under Jean-Paul Laurens from 1904 to 1905. Gagnon distinguished himself early in his career by the quality of his engravings, and won an honourable mention for his work at the Salon de la Soci été des artistes français in 1905.
In Paris, Gagnon also met other Canadian painters such as James Wilson Morrrice with whom he sketched.Gagnon adopted Morrice’s method of painting quickly on the spot. In 1908, Gagnon returned to Canada, and settled in Baie-Saint-Paul region of Charlevoix which became his preferred sketching area. His affection for French-Canadian life is evident in his anecdotal series of depictions of habitant life, a theme to which he returned throughout his career.
From 1909 to 1914 Gagnon moved between Canada, France and Norway, always working up the sketches he had made in Quebec. His career reached a turning point when the Paris art dealer Adrien M. Reitlinger offered him an exhibition in his Montparnasse gallery. After the 1913 Paris show, Gagnon portrayed the Canadian landscape almost exclusively, and generally in wintertime. He invented a new type of landscape – a winter world composed of valleys and mountains, of sharp contrasts of light and shadow, of vivid colours, and of sinuous lines. He ground his own paints, and from 1916 his palette consisted of pure white, reds, blues and yellows.
From 1924 to 1936 Gagnon lived in Paris once again. He began devoting most of his energy to creating the illustrations for two works of fiction Le Grand Silence blanc by L. F. Rouquette (Paris, 1928) and Marie Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon (Paris, 1933), a story that celebrated Canadian frontier life.
In 1936 Gagnon returned to canada where he died on 5 January, 1942. He was sixty one years old. Clarence Gagnon was a a full member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (1922). In 1923, he received the Trevor Prize of the Salmagundi Club of New York. He thumbprinted the back of his canvases to ensure against forgeries.
source: National Gallery of Canada Archives
