Laurier Lacroix, Suzor-Coté: Light and Matter, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2002, page 161-63
After studying in France for seventeen years, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté returned to his hometown of Arthabaska in 1907. He chose to devote his art entirely to the Canadian landscape, telling a journalist from “The Globe” in 1910: “I think an artist must paint his own country.... When the technical part of the study is over you must come back to your own country and paint what is there. If you are really an artist, that is the only thing you will paint well.”
Suzor-Coté took on a nomadic lifestyle for over a decade, shifting between Arthabaska and Montreal, while taking several short trips throughout Quebec, Ontario, the United States, and back to France. “Near Arthabaska at Dusk”, completed in 1922, depicts a moody, romantic landscape of his hometown at sunset. Suzor-Coté particularly enjoyed studying the variations of light at different times of day, as reflected in the luminous sky dappled with strokes of aqua and yellow.
Rejecting more academic and history painting, Suzor-Coté focused instead on representing nature as a way of forging an identity for his home country. Canadian painters who trained primarily in France and Great Britain, including Suzor-Coté, were beginning to suggest a new way of defining the Canadian identity as they sought to explore the uniqueness of the landscape around them. Laurier Lacroix describes Suzor-Coté’s involvement with this change in Canadian art in his depiction of Arthabaska: “The representation of landscapes in descriptive or picturesque form, a tradition that developed throughout the 19th century in Quebec, now had to make way for a more indigenous and interior vision. For Suzor-Coté, the area around the village of Arthabaska was the ideal location to establish such a relationship with nature. Suzor-Coté succeeded in grasping the atmosphere of this corner of the country, or at least in grafting his own perception on it.”
