signed lower left; titled and dated 1970 on the reverse
16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm)
Auction Estimate:$8,000 - $12,000
Sale date:June 15, 2022
Price Realized
$14,400
(including Buyer's Premium)
Provenance
Art Lenders, Montreal
Galerie Valentin, Montreal
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature
Terry Rigelhof, “Philip Surrey (1910-1990): Retrospective Exhibition”, Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal, 2004, page 2
Philip Surrey was a figurative painter with an enduring interest in human subjects within urban nightscapes. He occupied a unique place within twentieth-century Canadian art history, which was dominated largely by landscape painting in the 1930s and 1940s, and abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s. For most of his career, Surrey used Montreal as his stage, depicting and arranging pedestrians wandering the usually empty streets. In “Sherbrooke Street West, West of Claremont”, Surrey creates an imagined and cinematic nocturnal scene, emphasized by the glowing light beneath the storefront awnings. Figures dressed in chic summer garb walk along Sherbrooke Street near the border of Westmount and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, an area filled with boutiques, cafés and bistros.
