Sold for: $38,025

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Montreal

Clarence Gagnon’s pastorals are scenes of idyllic beauty, suffused with a sense of gentle tranquility and peace. In Paysage, Gagnon places a screen of inky trees in the immediate near ground, with their black boughs directly in our field of vision. Yet the work is masterfully handled to convey a sense of distance rather than one of closeness. The trees present an invitation rather than a barrier, and while we feel that we are in a cool, shadowed region looking out onto a hillside lit by a magical half-light, we are taken immediately into the distance. Gagnon was a superb technician and a master of etching and printing. In the tradition of Impressionism, he studied the effects of light upon his subjects with intense scrutiny in order to capture the feeling of a delicate shadow, the rich blackness of a forest or the soft green of a verdant plain. Here, the pink-porcelain sky and pale blue hills meet seamlessly with the distant land, while an area of trees tipped with ochre-coloured light draws us into the very centre of the work.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars