Kastel Gallery, Montreal
Galerie Valentin, Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal
Private Collection, Ontario
Literature
Richard H. Haviland, “Canadian Art and Artists—Miss Anne Savage, art educationalist and landscape painter,” Montreal Standard, March 18, 1939, quoted in “The Beaver Hall Group and Its Legacy”, Toronto, 2017, page 135
A more modern rendition of the Canadian landscape and fishing industry built on local communities of the Saint Lawrence, here Anne Savage has maintained the Quebec francophone tradition of capturing the signs of habitation within the landscape. Savage has used the fishing village as a vehicle to experiment with bold forms of soft pastel pigments. The scene has been executed with a keen sense of form, compositional balance and a nod to abstraction with its reduced and simplified forms. The drying fish nets have been delineated as more simplified geometrics while still maintaining a rhythmic tension as the eye moves over the composition with the help of the curvilinear contour lines the artist has incorporated. On the artist’s work, art critic Richard H. Haviland explains: “She is completely the landscape artist. A modernist, she is an able interpreter of the Canadian scene, and seeks to bring out the main characteristics of her subject with a bold summarization of forms. Her work is strongly coloured and shows a fine sense of design.”
