Oat Field in the Sun, circa 1950

Dominion Gallery, Montreal Gallery One, Toronto Private Collection, Toronto

Sandra Paikowsky, “Goodridge Roberts, 1904-1974”, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1998, pages 119-120

“Oat Field in the Sun” (1950) is exemplary of William Goodridge Roberts' numerous expressive landscape paintings of rural Quebec. The artist had spent his summers of the 1940s painting in a number of different regions of Eastern Canada, including Georgian Bay, Outaouais, the Laurentians, the Eastern Townships and Charlevoix. In the summers of 1949 and 1950, Roberts travelled to Baie St Paul, where he set a goal for himself to create a minimum of one-hundred works in a single summer, signifying his growing confidence. In a letter to his poet-sister Dorothy Leisner, Roberts wrote: “My reputation is growing pretty rapidly, which is a good thing from the point of view of future income and what's more important I really think my work is developing steadily.” Roberts' paintings of this time, such as “Oat Field in the Sun”, are much more traditional in contrast with many of his contemporaries in Quebec, as the province had a thriving “avant-garde” art scene. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1950 Spring Show was regarded as a site for political protest by the avant-garde. Protesters objected to the exclusions of Jean-Paul Mousseau, Marcelle Ferron, Marcel Barbeau, and other young automatistes. Their placards demanding “un jury indépendant” were directed against Jury III, composed of more conservative and traditional artists, namely William Goodridge Roberts, Stanley Cosgrove, and Jacques Godefroy De Tonnancour. Roberts' own two landscape paintings that were featured in the show are said to have “caused much less of a stir”.