Sold for: $8,190

PROVENANCE
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
The PSBGM Cultural Heritage Foundation

LITERATURE
Janet M. Brooke et al, The Frederick Simpson Coburn Collection, Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, 1996, essay by Monique Nadeau-Saumier, page 35

EXHIBITED
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal, Hommage à F.S. Coburn (1871 - 1960), September 1986, catalogue #31

Frederick Coburn’s best known theme was that of horse-drawn sleighs in the Quebec countryside near his familiar terrain of Upper Melbourne – sometimes jauntily transporting people and sometimes working, such as pulling sledges loaded with lumber – typically in winter. This is a rare summer scene, depicting a horse team harrowing the land, a process that prepares the soil for seeding. Monique Nadeau-Saumier writes that it is “‘the human history of the nation’ that provided a fertile ground for the development of his art, specifically in the activities of the woodsmen and farmers of the St. Francis River Valley.” Beautifully detailed, and painted with vigorous brush-strokes, there is much for the eye to savour, from the lush foreground foliage to the delicate patterns of birds in the sky. Coburn captures the activities of the farm in a fresh and natural way, observing the man involved in his work, the watchful dog, the patient horses and the livestock grazing in the background. Coburn’s consummate knowledge of composition, light effects and paint handling is fully manifest in this work, so expressive of the spirit of rural Quebec.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars