Painterly and energetic, Still Life with Blue Book is among the finest examples of L.L. FitzGerald’s painting from the late 1940s. On an extended leave of absence from teaching at the Winnipeg School of Art, the period around 1948 saw some of the artist’s most complex arrangements to date. Certainly the bottle-and-book, around which the composition pivots, are vividly rendered on the tilted plane of the table, while the sprig of a rubber plant ornately spilling from a jar recalls one of FitzGerald’s finest works, The Little Plant (collection of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection), painted a year earlier. The painting also demonstrates the influence of the French Impressionists of a generation previous: in particular Paul Cézanne's still lifes, as well as the pointillist techniques of Georges Seurat, here done with diligent applications of paint in small strokes of the palette-knife to create a mottled, mosaic-like surface.

The work also includes several elements that point to the artist’s growing interest in abstraction that he would further explore in the 1950s: in addition to the dissolved pointillist surface, we see the spilled geometries of the cloth, the diffuse treatment of light, and the indeterminate structure of the rear wall, with only the crack of a door on the extreme right edge grounding the scene in recognizable space. Presaging his turn to greater abstraction while remaining rooted in modernist expertise, Still Life with Blue Book is an emblematic demonstration of the skill and subtlety of FitzGerald’s late career painting.

This work was included in an important 1951 group show at Montreal’s Dominion Gallery, organized by Max Stern after a two-month tour of Western Canada, alongside FitzGerald’s important c.1928 canvas, Pritchard’s Fence (collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario). That show marked a crucial moment in bringing Western and Prairie artists to an Eastern audience, and also included works by Maxwell Bates, W.J. Phillips, and, notably, E.J. Hughes - the beginning of a lifelong relationship between that artist and Stern.

We thank Michael Parke-Taylor, art historian, curator and author of Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald: Life & Work, for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.