Sorbet aux douze oranges, 1969

Galerie Agnes Lefort, Montreal Private Collection, Toronto

Richard Simmins and Doris Shadbolt, De Tonnancour, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1966, page 3

De Tonnancour established a reputation for himself as a painter of the Canadian landscape, with a brief interlude in the late 1940s to focus on still life and figurative works. By 1960, his landscapes were steadily becoming more simplified, eventually leading to abstract works with only a subtle reference to landscape in their composition. De Tonnancour subsequently experimented with collage and foreign materials, approaching fully non-representational paintings. “Sorbet aux douze oranges” (Twelve Orange Sherbet), a mixed media on board dating to 1969, marks the moment when the artist fully embraced abstraction in a “hard-edge” approach. Repeating disc-like shapes are commonly found in De Tonnancour's work of these years; in this instance they serve to represent oranges in an orange sorbet, as the title suggests. The title's association to the formal composition itself demonstrates the artist's tendency to never fully abandon associative content. In fact, very few artworks by de Tonnancour are capable of being defined as purely abstract.