East Kildonan, 1920

Collection of Douglas M. Duncan, Toronto Collection of The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1970

"FitzGerald in Rural Manitoba", Winnipeg Art Gallery; travelling across the province to McCreary; Neepawa; Dauphin; Virden; Holland; Leaf Rapids and Portage la Prairie, 6 March 1992-10 November 1993 "L.L. Fitzgerald's Impressionist Decade 1910-1920", Winnipeg Art Gallery, Spring 2015

"FitzGerald in Rural Manitoba", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1992

As a teenager, Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald awakened to art when he discovered the Carnegie Library in Winnipeg shortly after it opened in 1905. There he read the writings of the British artist and critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who not only offered guidance on how to draw but introduced FitzGerald to England’s most famous nineteenth- century landscape painters: John Constable (1776–1837) and J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851). After several classes in drawing from a living model at A.S. Keszthelyi’s School of Fine Arts in 1909, FitzGerald entered the world of commercial art where he worked for the next nine years. By the beginning of the First World War, his exposure to fine art would have been informed primarily by Barbizon and Hague School landscape paintings with some knowledge of French Impressionism gained indirectly by looking at black-and-white reproductions in the "Studio Magazine" and its American counterpart "International Studio". FitzGerald might also have seen some French Impressionist inspired paintings by Canadian artists such as Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Maurice Cullen, and Clarence Gagnon when the Winnipeg Museum of Fine Arts (now the Winnipeg Art Gallery) opened in 1912. FitzGerald would not embark on a formal course of art training until late 1921 when he attended the Art Students League in New York. But in 1920, at age thirty, he was sketching and painting en plein air in the immediate environs of Winnipeg. He painted several pictures in East Kildonan, a primarily agricultural community located about eight kilometres northeast of Winnipeg that could be reached easily by streetcar from downtown. The “Rural Municipality of East Kildonan,” as it was known at the time, became one of FitzGerald’s favourite painting locations and a place that in the early thirties also inspired Winnipeg artists Eric Bergman and Caven Atkins. "East Kildonan", 1920 presents a lively version of FitzGerald’s self- taught Impressionism. The active brushwork of the lush foreground foliage, conceived in blue and green, is complemented by the colour of the farm buildings that are set against an active pattern of sky and cloud. Human presence is represented by the barn and water tower. FitzGerald’s brushwork blends these elements with the rural landscape to create a unity and overall feeling of harmony and natural beauty. Michael Parke-Taylor is a Canadian art historian, curator, and author of "Bertram Brooker: When We Awake!" (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2024) and editor of "Some Magnetic Force: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Writings" (Concordia University Press, 2023). This artwork is being sold to benefit the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG)-Qaumajuq in establishing an endowment fund to support more diverse representation in the permanent collection, beginning with contemporary Canadian art. Cowley Abbott is pleased to donate our selling commission to the fund as part of the sale.