Artwork by Marc-Aurèle Fortin,  La Seine à Paris

Marc-Aurèle Fortin
La Seine à Paris

oil on canvas, laid down on board
signed lower left
9 x 13.25 ins ( 22.9 x 33.7 cms )

Auction Estimate: $7,000.00$5,000.00 - $7,000.00

Price Realized $8,850.00
Sale date: September 24th 2020

Provenance:
Galerie L’art français, Montreal
The Collection of Senator E. Leo Kolber, Montreal
It was following a brief trip to London and Paris in 1920 when Marc-Aurèle Fortin decided to paint full-time and exhibit his work. The artist was undoubtedly inspired by the cities’ renowned fine art museums as well as the picturesque scenery and local architecture. He returned to Europe again in 1934 as an established painter, having developed a reputation for colourful renditions of rural Quebec. During this second trip, which endured several months, Fortin spent time in Paris, the Côte d’Azur, the Rhone Valley, as well as Italy. The painter returned to Quebec in 1935 with several pencil and oil sketches of Paris, Nice and Rouen. The charming oil on board “La Seine à Paris” depicts the popular subject of Paris’ many bridges that connect the Right and Left banks, in a style that is quintessentially Fortin.

This painting was in the collection of the esteemed Leo Kolber, former senator, lawyer, businessman and philanthropist. Mr. Kolber called Montreal home, and was an important benefactor for the city, actively supporting the Orchestre symphonique de Montreal, McGill University and the Jewish General Hospital, and for many years was the chief fundraiser for the Liberal Party of Canada.

Mr. Kolber studied law at McGill University, where he encountered Charles Bronfman, the two becoming close friends. It was through this connection that Mr. Kolber was hired by Sam Bronfman, head of the Bronfman business empire, to run CEMP Investments. Kolber was also an active participant on boards for numerous corporations, including the Cineplex Odeon Corporation, TD Bank and the Seagram Company. He established the Cadillac Fairview Corporation, one of North America’s largest real estate firms. In 1983, Mr. Kolber was named to the senate and served as the chairman to the Standing Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce. Mr. Kolber retired from the Senate in 2004. A proud and generous supporter of many cultural and civic organizations in Montreal, Mr. Kolber was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2007.

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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