Winter, Saint-Sauveur, circa 1932

Gift of the artist to his brother, Jacques By descent to the artist’s nephew, USA Private Collection, Montreal

Frances K. Smith, Andre Bieler: An Artist’s Life and Times, Merritt Publishing Company Limited, Toronto/Vancouver, 1980, page 77, for an image of Bieler with a painting on his easel which may be this artwork at an earlier stage

A modernist painter of small-town Quebec landscape, Swiss-born André Bieler studied at the Institut Technique de Montréal before enlisting in the Canadian Army in World War I. He subsequently studied at the New York Art Students League in Woodstock, New York, as well as in Switzerland and Paris. Bieler held his first solo exhibition at the Montreal Art Association in 1924, and permanently returned to Canada two years later, settling in Ste-Famille on Ile d’Orléans in the Gaspé area of Quebec. Seeking a more active and social art community, in 1930 Bieler moved to 1100 Beaver Hall Hill in Montreal, the centre of the Beaver Hall Group. Thereafter, the artist’s work grew increasingly modernist and experimentational in stylistic approach. “Winter, Saint-Sauveur” was painted in 1932, shortly after Bieler got married, and while modern art was flourishing in Montreal. During the early thirties he was taking frequent trips to the Laurentians to depict Quebec’s wilderness. The artist’s brother Jacques found and renovated a pioneer house in the village of Saint-Sauveur, which became a painting studio for André. A crisp and peaceful winter’s day is skilfully rendered in the curving lines and reductive forms of “Winter, Saint-Sauveur”, with multiple layers of trees and mountains leading the viewer’s eye into the distance. André Bieler and his wife Jeanette were living in Montreal in the early 1930s and would regularly spend weekends in St. Sauveur at his brother Jacques’ home “La Maison Rose”, “…which became a ‘painting place’ for André during this period…”. A circa 1932 photograph of Bieler at the house shows the painter in front of a developing artwork on his canvas, the work possibly this painting at an early stage. Winter, Saint-Sauveur would be a gift to Jacques, the artwork remaining in the artist’s family until this offering.