Artwork by Marc-Aurèle Fortin,  Ste. Rose paysage

Marc-Aurèle Fortin
Ste. Rose paysage

oil on board
signed on the reverse; dated 1939 on the gallery label on the reverse
21.5 x 23.5 ins ( 54.6 x 59.7 cms )

Auction Estimate: $80,000.00$60,000.00 - $80,000.00

Price Realized $70,800.00
Sale date: November 20th 2018

Provenance:
Galerie L’Art français, Montreal
The Collection of TransCanada PipeLines Limited, Calgary
Literature:
Jacques De Roussan, Marc-Aurèle Fortin, Quebec, 1982, page 36
Born in Sainte-Rose, Marc-Aurèle Fortin’s early artistic training came at home under the tutelage of artists including Ludger Larose and Edmond Dyonnet before his studies would take him to Chicago, New York, Boston and later, to France. It was after a brief trip to France in 1920 that Fortin began to work full-time as a painter and to show his work, which included scenes of the island of Montreal, predominantly rural at the time, and of his birthplace Sainte-Rose, north of the island. During the summers, he travelled to Quebec City, Île d'Orléans and the Charlevoix region, sketching and painting houses and rural scenes. Fortin became renowned for capturing the charm of small-town Quebec in his vibrant works, as exemplified in this delightful example, “Ste. Rose paysage”.

In this enchanting oil painting depicting the artist’s hometown in winter, Fortin skilfully rendered his varied and decorative colour palette, demonstrated in the yellow, pink and blue sky as well as the bright red building wall. A blanket of snow covers the front lawns and street in this nighttime scene, while a figure and a horse-drawn cab march along the unplowed road. As with the painter’s most celebrated work, any presence of darkness is overpowered by colour. Completed in 1939, “Ste. Rose paysage” illustrates the artist’s then-preferred subject of the nocturnal winter scene. The painting also reflects the distinctive high-contrast colour palette that Fortin adopted in the late 1930s, known as the ‘black period’. After an inspirational year-long sojourn in France between 1934 and 1935, the artist returned to Sainte-Rose and began experimenting with the application of pure colours onto a black surface. Using a support of wood, canvas or metal, Fortin painted a thick layer of black pigment, which he left to dry during a period of time before painting his subject in large brushstrokes dipped in vivid colours. By deliberately leaving the black paint of the first layer visible in certain areas, the artist achieved luminous and brilliant colour juxtapositions.

Author Jacques de Roussan describes Fortin’s village scenes from this experimental period of the late 1930s as being “full of romantic atmosphere.” The artist found ample success during these years; he exhibited regularly at Eaton Gallery from 1937 to 1939, and in 1939 he was awarded a bronze medal at the New York World’s Fair. De Roussan further remarked on Fortin’s growing success of the time, writing that “newspapers began to take a serious interest in him and referred to him as “Merlin the Enchanter”, and affirmed that his artworks were a revelation from both an aesthetic and technical perspective.” “Ste. Rose paysage” beautifully illustrates Fortin’s innovative painterly techniques in the late 1930s, which assisted in the artist’s burgeoning success and recognition.

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Marc-Aurèle Fortin
(1888 - 1970) RCA, ARCA

Born in Ste-Rose, north of Montreal, Marc-Aurèle Fortin studied art in the evenings while he made a living. His father was a judge and did not approve of his son studying art because he thought it was not a practical way of making a living. He attended the Ecole du Plateau, where he studied under Ludger Larose (1906-1908) and at the Council of Arts & Manufactures, Montreal under Edmond Dyonnet.

Around 1908, he became employed by the post office department in Montreal and from there travelled west to Edmonton, where he worked as a bank clerk and at several other jobs until he saved enough money to go to the United States for study at the Art Institute of Chicago with Edward J. Timmons (c. 1910), also studying in New York City and Boston.

Fortin returned to Montreal in 1914. He painted landscapes at Ste-Rose as well as at Piedmont and Montreal Harbour. He made a short trip to France and England (1920-22), which influenced his style. He exhibited in Chicago (1929) and at Pretoria, South Africa (1930). In 1935, he was again in Europe, where he painted in southern France and northern Italy.

On his return to Canada, he exhibited at T. Eaton Company in Montreal. During one of his exhibitions in 1937, St. George Burgoyne of “The Gazette” noted. “…Mr. Fortin is courageous; individual and an experimenter and many of the works on view suggest that the treatment might conceivably be more effective if employed on big scale decorations, rather than on pictures for the embellishment of the average room…” Burgoyne, in a 1938 review, praised his resourcefulness in finding new pictorial angles particularly in his water colours and also how effective were his smaller harbour scenes. It was during this year that Fortin’s work was chosen for the exhibit at the Tate Gallery, London, in “A Century of Canadian Art”. He received further recognition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s Spring Exhibition in 1938 for his water colour landscape, “Les Eboulements” (1938), which won the Jessie Dow Prize.

He won a bronze medal at the N.Y. World’s Fair (1939). In 1945, he took part in the show, “Canadian Art in Brazil”, when Marcelle-Louis Proux, writing in the Planalto of Sao Paulo, noted, “He is a brilliant colourist, who looks on painting as a ‘plastic poetry’.” By this time, he had made trips to the Gaspé, Baie-Saint-Paul, and Lac St-Jean regions.

In 1955, Fortin became ill and stopped painting for seven years. His legs had to be amputated. He began his long road to recovery and painted from his wheelchair. Writing on his 1963 retrospective show at the Mount Royal Art Centre, Raymond Heard reflected, “A gentle and nostalgic world is reflected in Mr. Fortin’s canvases. It is a world of curdled clouds and patchwork field in which anonymous rustics labor in the shadow of lonely, wind-tossed elms. When he turns his eye to the city, Mr. Fortin sees rows of quaint Old World dwellings in Quebec, or broad views of Montreal in the days before the urban sprawl scrambled much of the beauty into an untidy blur of smoke and concrete.”

In 1963, a retrospective show of Fortin’s work was held at the National Gallery of Canada and in the exhibition catalogue, Jean-René Ostiguy noted, “After his trip to Europe, when his style came close to resembling that of the Group of Seven, he succeeded in preserving a quality of expression belonging to the people, a kind of crudeness which is regarded by some as violent but which really resulted from his brusque execution of his work…. Fortin oscillated between decorative imagery and Fauvism. When he was at his best, he mingled the two…”

Literature Source:
"A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume 1: A-F, 5th Edition, Revised and Expanded", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1997