PROVENANCE
The Elizabeth T. Greenshields Memorial Foundation, Montreal, 1970

Please note as this work is located at the office it was appraised by way of digital images and details provided by the owner.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Laurier Lacroix, Suzor-Coté, Light and Matter, National Gallery of Canada and Musée du Québec, 2002, pages 244 and 266, reproduced pages 267 and 349 and reproduced in an installation photograph from the 1929 exhibition page 312

Please note this work was inspected at 2247 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC on 14-May-2013.

EXPOSITION
Art Association of Montreal, Forty-Second Spring Exhibition, April 2 - 26, 1925, same cast, catalogue #401
École des beaux-arts de Montréal, Rétrospective Suzor-Coté, December 3 - 20, 1929, listed as Haleur de bois, catalogue #144

Laurier Lacroix writes, “The majority of Suzor-Coté’s sculptures draw on one aspect or another of the land and one of his most ambitious works was Hauling Logs, a subject he first treated around 1909, then took up again in 1920 and exhibited in 1924. The theme, with its explicit sense of movement, consists of a farmer drawing a load of wood. The sculpture is conceived as a bas-relief frieze and its horizontal format ironically destines it to wind up over a mantelpiece.”

In 1910, Marc-Aurèle Suzor-Coté exhibited the maquette for this work at the Ontario Society of Artists. Never made to endure and now lost, it is known only through a photograph in which we see that the farmer and horse were made of sculpted plaster and that the artist used small branches and natural wood for the logs and sled. This quaint and extremely detailed maquette was also used as a subject for a painting, exhibited in that same year at the Art Association of Montreal, also in an unknown location.

Suzor-Coté returned to the theme again in 1924 when he made a painting and a bronze of the log hauler. Hauling Logs, the 1924 oil on canvas, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, is a masterwork, true to the form of the original maquette and full of energy and movement. All the details of the model are found therein, the axe stuck into one of the logs, the blowing scarf of the farmer, the chuffing energy of the horse. In Le halage du bois, the details vary only slightly from that of the original maquette and the National Gallery of Canada’s painting, to allow for the different medium of bronze. The reins have become a whip that the farmer holds in one hand and flicks lightly above the haunches of the horse as it strains against the load of wood. The farmer’s other hand - having no reins to hold - has been stuffed into his pocket, emphasizing the cold of winter that one reads instantly from this action. Measuring more than a metre and a half in length, this unique and delightful bronze is the only work the artist is known to have executed in the style of a frieze. Suzor-Coté understood the painterly equivalents of a frieze-style work, and used the qualities of the landscape format to emphasize the painterly aspects of bronze. The bronze is textured and very finely detailed, and in the different castings, coloured patinas give the work a painterly feel.

When the bronze was shown in 1925 at the Art Association of Montreal, it elicited this response from Albert Laberge in La Presse, April 3, 1925: “Mr. Suzor-Côté…is establishing himself as a powerful sculptor…This composition is full of movement and action, reflecting a thorough knowledge of nature and a highly developed faculty of observation.” When the work was shown in the Suzor-Coté retrospective exhibition at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal in 1929, it was placed just off the floor, under the paintings. It was often noted, during the artist’s lifetime, that his work in bronze equaled and, in some cases, surpassed his work in paint. Lacroix notes, “The sensitivity with which Suzor-Coté approached the technique of sculpting in the round, his ability to synthesise and suggest movement, and his skill in animating matter all derived from the French school of sculpture as it was practised in the late 19th century. Nonetheless, he was able to transcend this influence in his Canadian subjects, infusing them with a presence and a permanence that no other artist has ever matched."

This sculpture is a rare second cast, done from the original plaster around the time the artist passed away, produced between 1937 and 1950.

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