Sold for: $152,100

PROVENANCE
The PSBGM Cultural Heritage Foundation
Sold sale of Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 15, 2013, lot 126
Private Collection, British Columbia

Purchased at Heffel's Spring 2013 auction for $152,100 including Buyer's Premium
Estimate was $90,000 - $120,000

LITERATURE
A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson, 1958, pages 82, 166 and 167

Wild weather exhilarated A.Y. Jackson. His brushwork, so full of movement in this wind-swept, lilting scene, conveys a feeling of windblown vitality to us instantly. In this quaint village of Saint-Siméon set on the edge of the St. Lawrence River, even the buildings seem to have been arranged to withstand the wind that blows steadily across the water, licking it into waves while curling the clouds in the sky. It is a shoreline shaped by a powerful force, a place where the land and people are at the water’s mercy.

Jackson was very familiar with the St. Lawrence, and was asked to illustrate a book about it as part of the ambitious Rivers of America Series, published in 1942 in the United States by Farrar & Rinehart. A highly collected series of books, it contained 65 volumes and was issued under three different publishers over 37 years. The Jackson-illustrated St. Lawrence volume was reissued in 2012. This commission was taken on during the Second World War, and Jackson, so familiar with Quebec’s riverside villages, assumed he would be able to paint wherever he liked. Instead, he found himself being repeatedly questioned as to his motives for sitting alone on the St. Lawrence, and was forced to seek permits to paint near ports of any strategic significance. He was once, while not actually arrested, taken under armed guard to port officials to explain himself.

Nonetheless, Jackson’s affection for the St. Lawrence’s shoreline would last throughout his life. “I have worked in villages on both the north and south shores...In thirty years I missed only one season, the year I was teaching at the Ontario College of Art. I have happy memories of a great many places, from St. Joachim to Tadoussac, and on the south shore from Lévis to Fox River in Gaspé. The canvasses I painted there are scattered from New Zealand to Brazil and Barbados, throughout the United States, and all over Canada.”

His palette in Saint-Simeon, Lower St. Lawrence is especially lovely, with the colour of the river water echoed in the muddy brown-greens of the road - linking the land and the river so nicely – and the rusty red of the truck’s cab is recalled in the red of the hill in the middle ground, tying the human elements to the land itself. Further, he uses the same violet - in different levels of saturation - to create horizontal slices of cloud in the sky and to highlight the vertical faces of homes in the village, another unifying touch. The bright emerald green of the boat behind the bare tree branches and two middle ground homes form a further connection. Jackson was a master of these painterly subtleties. His depiction of the Quebec landscape and aspects of the lives his fellow Quebecers lived upon it is a gentle dance of people and place. He was just as at home in Saint-Siméon as the villagers were, and thus his depiction of the village seems effortless and relaxed, with fluid and assured brushwork that is used with a consistent touch to depict the sky, water, earth, ramshackle buildings and fence posts, boats and people. The horse-drawn cart and red truck add a further human note to this depiction of life lived on the edge of one of North America’s largest rivers.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars