Mabel C. Evans, 1979
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, Montreal
Private Collection
Exhibited
“Royal Canadian Academy of Arts”, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 30 March 1892, no. 65 as “Carpenter’s Shop” ($75)
“Annual Spring Exhibition, Art Association of Montreal”, 18 April‒4 May 1892, no. 18 as “The Carpenter’s Shop” ($75)
“William Brymner 1855‒1925 A Retrospective”, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston; travelling to National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée du Québec, 13 May‒11 November 1979, no. 20 as “The Carpenter’s Shop”
Literature
‘Art Notes’, “The Week”, IX:19 (8 April 1892) page 298
William Brymner, ‘Village Life in Three Countries’, “The University Magazine” (Montreal) XI (April 1912), pages 309‒326
Janet Braide, “William Brymner 1855‒1925: A Retrospective, Kingston”, 1979, page 82
A.K. Prakash, ‘William Brymner (1855‒1925) Libérateur’, “MagazinArt”, 16:1 (Fall 2003), reproduced page 11
The Scottish-born William Brymner spent his youth in Melbourne in the Eastern Townships, and in Montreal, until 1872 when his family moved to Ottawa as his father, Douglas Brymner, had been appointed Canada’s first Dominion Archivist. William began working as a draughtsman for the Chief Architect in the federal Department of Public Works but soon abandoned architecture for painting, and in 1878 began studies at the Académie Julian in Paris.
Like so many foreign students apprenticing in France, winters were spent in Paris working in the academies or studios of prominent artists, and summers travelling and painting in small French villages or artists’ colonies. In 1883, Brymner and fellow art student Fred Brown painted in the village of Pontaubert. “On wet days … I liked the sabot-makers’ shops the best: they were so clean with all their chips and shavings,” he later wrote. The resultant canvas, “With Dolly at the Sabot Maker’s”, was purchased for the National Gallery of Canada (acc. no. 35) the following year.
Brymner frequently depicted men and women at work as exemplified by his paintings of a cobbler and blacksmith, a spinner, quilt maker, seamstress and weaver, as well as the sabot maker. He later wrote fondly of the skills of Michel Marquis at whose home he lodged when painting at Sainte-Famille on the Île d’Orléans. “In winter he converts the kitchen into a workshop where he makes furniture, principally chests of drawers. They are generally made of yellow butternut, enriched with black walnut ornaments; and although the drawers do not always run true, and are, in trying to shut them, a frequent cause of profanity, a set of them has come to be a necessary part of every properly equipped Ste. Famille bride’s outfit.”
Janet Braide has suggested that Brymner might have started this canvas while travelling in Ireland and the Low Countries in the summer of 1891 and has observed that the composition is reminiscent of “With Dolly at the Sabot Maker’s”, similarly remarked upon by the writer in “The Week” in 1892. Yet by eliminating the narrative element of the child and “Dolly,” he creates a more naturalistic treatment of the subject. As in a number of Brymner’s canvases, the man works by the light from the window, a necessity in a pre-electrical age. He concentrates intently on his work, shavings litter the floor and the tools are accurately observed and inventoried. An overall brown tonality unites the composition but is highlighted by the blue of the man’s trousers and the brick wall glimpsed through the window.
