PROVENANCE
Private Collection
By descent to a Private Collection, Vancouver
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 30, 2002, lot 23
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Michèle Grandbois, Marc-Aurèle Fortin: The Experience of Colour, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2010, pages 12 and 247

EXHIBITED
Art Association of Montreal, Montreal, Exhibition of Paintings by Marc. A. Fortin, Montreal, December 21, 1932 - January 19, 1933, catalogue #11
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, Marc-Aurèle Fortin: The Experience of Colour, February 10 - May 8, 2011, traveling to McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, May 28 - September 11, 2011, catalogue #52

Marc-Aurèle Fortin excelled in depicting the landscape and towns of the Quebec countryside, and in the early 1930s would frequently leave Montreal, travelling by bicycle, to paint the rural communities that made up the surrounding area. Houses at Longueuil is an evocative depiction of one of these villages, now Montreal suburb, that showcases the vibrancy of colour and dramatic contrasts that define Fortin’s impressionism. Here, the glowing sunlight illuminates the bare streets and unadorned walls of the houses, while broadly foliated trees cast deep, dappled shadows. A pale sky is pushed aside by a towering summer cloud, while further trees and a chimney punctuate the scene with warm daubs of red. Fortin would frequently include figures in his village paintings, grounding the compositions in a human scale, which makes their absence here notable: the focus is on the stillness of the streets and the summer breeze in the leaves, with the only concession to a human presence in the right house’s front door, open to let the air in. Vivid and luminous, Landscape, Longueuil is an evocative instance of the harmonious relationship between village and nature, captured by one of Canada’s most important landscape artists.

Works on canvas by Fortin are exceedingly rare. The artist faced financial hardships and limited resources throughout his career, and purportedly was only ever able to secure a single roll of canvas for his paintings. This scarcity adds to the significance of works of this already exceptional calibre.

This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist's work.

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