Sold for: $58,500

PROVENANCE
Laing Galleries, Toronto
Alan Jarvis, Director of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from 1955 to 1959
By descent to the present Private Collection, British Columbia

LITERATURE
G. Blair Laing, Memoirs of an Art Dealer 2, 1982, page 164

EXHIBITED
Venice Biennale, XXIX Biennale International des Beaux Arts Venise, 1958, catalogue #403

Art dealer G. Blair Laing notes in his memoirs that “Jacques de Tonnancour was another splendid artist endowed with great energy and always searching for new ways to express his restless search for artistic truth. In the early 1940s, he had studied under Goodridge Roberts and was influenced by the Roberts landscapes, later though Tonnancour went on to develop his own unique painter visions.” Indeed it was from Laing that Alan Jarvis, director of the National Gallery of Canada from 1955 to 1959, purchased this work. It was also exhibited in the important XXIX Venice Biennale in 1958, and thus has an esteemed history. De Tonnancour was very active in the Montreal art world during the time of the Automatist movement, and was interested in figure, still life and landscape subjects. He wrote the Prisme d’yeux manifesto, which defended a variety of approaches to painting, and was not prepared to dispense with all things that had gone before. He employed an energetic, almost frenetic style of brushwork that is delicately calligraphic and has roots in pure drawing.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars