PROVENANCE
Watson Art Galleries, Montreal
Private Collection, Toronto
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 23, 2007, lot 99
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
J. Russell Harper, Krieghoff, 1979, page 120, reproduced page 124, catalogue #114

Cornelius Krieghoff’s skill at capturing the unpredictable nature of the northern climate is unmatched in nineteenth-century Canadian painting. This scene was painted at St. Anne’s Falls, with a view that looks downstream from the Grand Rocks, Quebec. Krieghoff was influenced by German painters such as Otto Jacobi, who also painted the precipice views from St. Anne’s. In J. Russell Harper’s influential study on Krieghoff, he draws an interesting comparison: “Such cataclysmic manifestations of nature’s force and destructive power have Wagnerian overtones: they echo the violence of the pagan gods expressed in the themes and sounds of his operas.” Krieghoff sets the tone and mood by imparting Edmund Burke’s notion of the ‘sublime’ in his painting. This romantic nineteenth-century interpretation is seen in The Storm, St. Anne’s, Quebec, where a dark and aggressive storm threatens, overpowering the last vestiges of blue sky visible in the painting.

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