Masters Gallery, Calgary
Private Collection, British Columbia
Literature
Pierre-Georges Roy, “L’Île d’Orlèans”, Quebec, 1928, reproduced page 392
F. Newlin Price, “Horatio Walker”, New York & Montreal, 1928, unpaginated, Potato Pickers reproduced plate 25
J. Russell Harper, “Painting in Canada”, Toronto, 1966, pages 209-11
Horatio Walker exhibits a kinship for the Barbizon tradition, wishing to depict the dignity of labour and ordinary life in his art. A “spiritual kinship” was struck with the countryside in 1880, when Walker embarked on a six-month walk along the St. Lawrence River, beginning in L’Epiphanie near Montreal and ending in Quebec City. As J. Russell Harper describes, Walker “visited country folk in their homes, smoked their “tabac canadien”, slept in barns at night, observed the rural ways, and always was sketching, sketching.” Inspired by this excursion, Walker executed “The Potato Gatherers” - an honest depiction of two workers toiling in the fields. As F. Newlin Price states, Walker’s paintings are “authentic documents of peasant life against an unstained sky, of a people of simple faith and rugged health, ruddy and buxom and wholesome”.
