Percé Rock, 1919

Private Collection, Victoria, British Columbia

The rich colours and intriguing handling in Florence McGillivray's "Percé", reflect the artist's knowledge of French painting of the period. McGillivray created a confident summary of a special place in Canadian life: Rocher Percé (Percé Rock) in Gaspé. McGillivray's take on the subject with the Rock in the far distance and the village of Gaspé in the foreground arranged in a suggestive tableau is one of mystery and beauty: the Rock's razor like edge seems to rise up magically in the background. A related work, half the size, shows that she studied the houses at the base of the rock carefully. For McGillivray, the main element was the way she made images from nature her own, the forms seeming to acknowledge the ascendancy of colour and handling. Her paintings from picturesque locations abroad such as Venice or Jamaica reveal the same skill: she paid homage to some of her fellow Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and asserted her own love of colour and bold handling of paint, offering not so much an appropriation as a new, vivid physical poetry. McGillivray was a transitional artist that made a big move as a mature woman into a powerful style. Her work holds up to the best in originality. Its sense of presence helps explain why Tom Thomson was so delighted and pleased by her visit to his studio in 1916. In their way of creating materially gorgeous and poetically haunting paintings, they were fellows. "She was the only one who understood immediately what I was trying to do," as he told a friend (S.E. Road, "Through a Woodsman's Eyes" (an interview with Mark Robinson), manuscript, Blodwen Davies fonds (MG30 D 38), Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa).