The Doctor

Masters Gallery, Calgary Private Collection, Calgary

“Restaurant Exhibition”, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1959

Louis Hemon (Illustrations by Clarence Gagnon), Maria Chapdelaine, Paris, 1933, page 170 for the canvas of this subject Ian M. Thom, Maria Chapdelaine: Illustrations, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, 1987, pages 24-28

Despite his vow to evade book illustration projects, in 1928 Clarence Gagnon was easily persuaded to take on the 1933 Mornay edition of “Maria Chapdelaine”. A romance novel published in 1914 by French writer Louis Hémon who was residing in Quebec at the time, “Maria Chapdelaine” was aimed at French and Quebec adolescents. The novel achieved great success, and has been extensively analyzed, adapted and translated throughout the decades. The story has caught the imagination of many artists, especially from Quebec, as well as commercial illustrators, all of whom were pleased to illustrate the landscape and traditional life of rural Quebec. Mornay Publications offered Gagnon the project and agreed to all of the artist’s strict demands on the book’s production. Gagnon laboured over three years on these illustrations, devoting great care to each image. The preparatory drawing and gouache The Doctor serves as a study for the final illustration, which was entitled “The Diagnosis”, in the Mornay edition of the novel. The final image appears to be nearly identical to the “The Doctor”; Gagnon renders the same minute details of the interior in both versions. Ian Thom writes that “Gagnon avoids portraying individual faces, often showing figures from behind or rendering the features by a few simple lines. In effect, the text is left to speak for the characters.” This statement holds true in the case of this work, as the doctor’s face is the only one out of the four figures that is depicted in detail. Gagnon created forty-two images to accompany the “Maria Chapdelaine” story. On the detail, quality and influence of Gagnon’s illustrations, Thom declared “Greater in number, and in colour rather than black and white and of a different character, the illustrations set a new standard for book illustration.”