Madeleine, 1937

Dominion Gallery, Montreal Madeleine Rocheleau Boyer, circa 1955 Estate of Madeleine Rocheleau Boyer Masters Gallery, Calgary Private Collection

"Edwin Holgate", Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; travelling to the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, 26 May 2005-15 April 2007, no. 91

Dennis Reid, "Edwin Holgate", Ottawa, 1976, no. 44, reproduced page 67 Brian Foss, Rosalind Pepall and Laura Brandon, "Edwin Holgate", 2005, no. 91, reproduced page 152

Edwin Holgate joined the Group of Seven in 1931 and was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters. Holgate established himself as one of the leaders of a modernist current in Canadian painting which centred on depictions of the human figure. His formal training in Paris under Lucien Simon and René Ménard in 1912 had provided him with a highly skilled approach based on careful draughtsmanship and considered compositions. Holgate had exhibited portraits and nudes with the Group of Seven as early as 1924. By the 1930s, he had created many celebrated portraits, while also receiving acclaim for his landscapes and wood engravings. Rather than work on commissioned portraits as a source of income, Holgate’s focus was on the exploration of the formal properties of portraiture. Holgate’s portrait of Madeleine Rocheleau Boyer alludes to both traditional and modernist conventions of portraiture. The studied composition of the sitter in profile harkens back to portraits of the early Renaissance. Similar profile views were favoured in the coins of ancient Greek and Rome. Europe of the fifteenth century had seen a revival of the art of antiquity, which coincided with a greater interest in individual identity and a new emphasis on portraiture. While Holgate based "Madeleine" on these traditional conventions, the model’s hair and makeup root the painting in the 1930s. The subjects of Holgate’s portraits tended to be family and friends of the artist. An artist herself, Madeleine Rocheleau Boyer worked at the studio of Holgate and Ernest Neumann. Popular as an artist’s model, Rocheleau posed for some of Holgate’s most celebrated oils of nudes in landscapes, including "Early Autumn" of 1938. In later years, she would exhibit her own work regularly in Montreal. Here, her expression appears stoic and introspective. Acclaimed for his portraits and nudes, Holgate’s interest in the formal possibilities of portraiture are evidenced by his methodical, carefully structured works.