Portrait de Rodolphe Brunet, 1897

The Artist Rodolphe Brunet, 1897 Rolande Brunet‒Raymond, 1949 Galerie l'Art français, Montreal, 1988 Jean‒Pierre Valentin, Montreal Acquired by the present Private Collection, September 1997

“Ozias Leduc, peintre et citoyen de Saint-Hilarie,” Musée d’art de Mont- Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, 1995 “Ozias Leduc: Art Art of Love and Reverie”, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; travelling to Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 22 February‒19 May 1996, no. 85 “70th Anniversary Exhibition”, Galerie Valentin, Montreal, 8‒25 September 2004

“La vie culturelle à Montreal,” vers 1900, reproduced page 64 André Michel, “Ozias Leduc, peintre et citoyen de Saint-Hilaire”, Mont-Saint-Hilaire, 1995, reproduced page 18 Pierre Lambert, “Ozias Leduc: Le peintre en quête de beauté”, Montreal, 2013, reproduced page 55 Monique Lanthier in Laurier Lacroix, “Ozias Leduc: An Art of Love and Reverie”, Montreal, 1996, no. 85, page 120, reproduced page 121

As Monique Lanthier’s shares in her catalogue essay for “Portrait of Rodolphe Brunet” in the catalogue for the 1996 exhibition “Ozias Leduc: An Art of Love and Reverie”: “Rodolphe Brunet (1860-1949) had published as a poet and journalist before spending seven years in Paris around the turn of the century. It was doubtless in his capacity as chairman of the Société canadienne de Paris that he met Leduc. [...] Around 1893-1894, he left for France, where he became friendly with a number of Canadian writers and artists, and collected their work. They included Raoul Barré, Henri Beau, Joseph-Charles Franchère, Charles Gill, Murray Prendergast, Joseph Saint-Charles and Suzor-Coté. [In this painting], Leduc freezes a moment of time, in a sfumato effect, with no hint as to place or period save for the clues given by clothes. Meticulous attention is paid to the details - the black suit, the stiff collar, the loosely tied tie with its tiepin - that give the sitter his dandified air. Much struck by Leduc’s meticulous technique, Brunet himself wrote, “I have seen a very well done portrait of his and sketches for paintings that look extremely promising. The rendering is such that the subjects seem alive”, and compared him to the Italian old masters rather than his contemporaries: ‘Mr. Leduc is no admirer of the Impressionist style or of the gallery devoted to the leaders of this new school at the Musée du Luxembourg. He is among those who believe that this gallery might aptly be renamed the Chamber of Horrors. And he is right. His own style is very different.’ Brunet’s opinion was doubtless based on a comparison of the portrait’s highly finished look, the result of innumerable brush strokes, with the looser Impressionist handling, and of his muted palette with their brighter colours. What is more, this was one of the few times that Leduc chose a permanent and sturdy support: a finely finished wood panel like those used by Renaissance painters. For the first time, he signed with a monogram where the initial letter of his first name becomes a circle containing his name and the date the work was executed. Two thirds of the back of the panel is covered with brown on which Leduc painted a miniature landscape in the thickly pigmented manner of his pochades of the 1900s. Lit by twilight colours, a path crosses a field diagonally and disappears into the distance. This tiny landscape is an enigma: is it a reminiscence of a French landscape seen during an outing to the Paris suburbs, or a nostalgic memory of the Richelieu Valley?”