Textes mis en ligne le 24 février 2003 , par Sophie MALTAIS, dans le cadre du cours HAR1830 Les arts en Nouvelle-France, au Québec et dans les Canadas avant 1867. Aucune vérification linguistique n'a été faite pour contrôler l'exactitude des transcriptions effectuées par l'équipe d'étudiants.
Peinture - Evolution 1946
Bibliographie de Jacques Robert, n° 19
Painting in Canada. A selective historical survey, Albany (N.Y.), Albany Institute of History and Art, 1946, p. 9-13.
AN ESSAY ON CANADIAN PAINTING
The story of Canadian painting begins with our early explorers. These men of universal culture knew as well how to sketch the animals and the scenery they looked upon, as to describe in their straightforward way the boundless countries which they discovered. Such was Samuel Champlain whose sixty-two drawings, touched up in water colors, now at the John Carter Brown Library at Providence, reveal both his remarkable spirit of observation and his eye for the harmony of colors.
For a long time, until about 1665, painting in Canada was an importation in the service of religion, either to decorate the churches and convents of the young French colony, or to impress the Indians whose conversion to Christianity was so desired. After 1665, undoubtedly many French pictures were still brought in; but from then on New France had its painters. Some of these were self-taught, such as the Jesuit Pierron who terrified his catechists with pictures of Hell, or the Abbé Pommier who was a portrait painter; others were rather professional artists, such as the Abbé Guyon, the first painter born in the land, whose early death cut short a promising career; and the Recollet Frère Luc who, before entering religious life, made the "voyage to Italy" and for a long time frequented the studios of Paris. These painters were churchmen and they devoted themselves to religious painting in a way that was normal in a society which was almost a theocracy. Until the end of the century, those who apply themselves to painting - without, however, leaving works of any importance - are ecclesiastics: Chauchetière, Drué, and Leblond de la Latour.
The 18th century opens, remarkably, with a group of craftsmen who learn to paint without masters. At a time when our masons, our sculptors in wood, our wrought-iron workers, and our silversmiths, are all submitted to long periods of apprenticeship, our painters grind their poor pigments and lay out their canvases without having really learned anything of their difficult craft. They are improvisors. The paintings of Pierre Le Ber (1707), the portraits of Michel Dessaillant, and the compositions of Paul Beaucourt, despite their qualities, have hardly escaped the ravages of time. Only one artist is an exception, Père François. This Recollet Frère Luc apparently studied his art for a long time. In the execution of his work he relied on a technique sufficient to insure its conservation. And there is a certain pleasant freedom in the subjects he treats.
The change of allegiance in 1763 altered little the state of Canadian painting. For the space of twenty years, it is very limited in scope. There are only some anonymous portraits, and some religious pictures by a certain Wolff, painted with a heavy and pasty hand. But the generation of 1785, while of a manual dexterity of wide diversity, included painters who, one might say, re-invented painting, and who manifested much vigorous simplicity of drawing and sobriety of colors. I am not referring here to François Beaucourt, son of a self-taught painter, who studied his art in Paris and Bordeaux and whose work recalls, by its virtuosity of technique and the warmth of its tones, the oily and ambered paintings of the pupils of Fragonard. I am referring rather to the other painters of this happy period. One of them, François Baillairgé, at once architect, sculptor, and painter, attended the Royal Academy at Paris from 1778 to 1781, and brought back to the Canadian school, if not the fragile grace of the Louis XVI style, at least a sort of sober classicism, tempered with what seem to us bizarre harmonies and not too unpleasant awkwardnesses. The other, Louis Dulongpré, a veteran of the American War of Independance, settled in Montreal in 1784, painted portraits of his friends of the Théâtre de Société , and really devoted himself to painting only after he had achieved successes as brilliant as they were unexpected. The dominant feature of this painting is a solid and healthy realism which neglects the picturesque in execution in order to apply itself rather to the character and to the physionomic particularities of his sitters. But his church paintings rarely attain the same realistic fervor, though they are characterized by smooth painting and reasonable correctness. The other painters of this generation are artists by chance. The Abbé Aide-Créquy, saddled with the taks of administering the large parish of Baie Saint-Paul, died young after learning to paint by himself in the rare leisure of his ministry. Louis-Chrétien de Heer, an Alsatian who landed in Quebec in 1783, had a similar experience. The first was solely a church painter. Imitating the Bolognese masters, he succeeded in accomplishing the tour de force of achieving excellent rustic painting, such as the Annunciation of l'Islet (1777). The other limned realistic portraits from an almost monochrome palette and painted large religious pictures in the style fo the Grand Siècle like the Saint Louis of the church of Vaudreuil (1792).
To sum up, the Canadian school of this period has progressed quite far from its starting point. Beginning with the pleasant classicism of Frère Luc and the artists of his time, because of the lack of contemporary masters and of artistic atmosphere it quite normally attained the state of a rustic or peasant art - quite rough and profoundly realistic - presenting itself in the guise of sombre pictures painted with some heaviness but rarely indifferent in interest or technique.
This state of things might have continued for a long time if there had not occurred at the end of the 18th century a demographic incident, limited it is true in its effects but more important than is usually realized. In 1793, there landed at Quebec some priests driven from their country by the French Revolution. At first there were but three. The following year, and until 1802, many others leave England for Canada - in all nearly fifty. Generally, they favor sumptuousness in religious ceremonies. Their eyes still carry in memory the elegances of the Louis XV style which had impressed them as children. Naturally, pictures occupy an important place in the decoration of their churches. From this tendency towards decoration there arises a profound impulse to develop the culture of the arts, an impulse which beginning with this handful of ecclesiastics soon reaches the whole of the population. It is the golden age of artists - architects, wood sculptors, silversmiths, painters - overloaded with orders, richly paid by parishes whose coffers have been filled by years of abundance. Were Canadian painters prepared, one may ask, to produce so much and so fast? Not at all. But the same exiles who launched this movement in painting also supplied the models. In 1816, the elder Abbé Desjardins shipped from Paris to Quebec some hundred pictures taken from Paris churches, illustrating the development of French painting from Simon Vouet to Ménageot. It is in restoring and in copying these canvases that Joseph Légaré and Antoine Plamondon, Jean-Baptiste Roy-Audy and Louis-Hubert Triaud, Francis Matte and Yves Tessier, learn intimately the technique of church painting and the various pictorial styles of the previous two centuries.
At the period we have now reached the Province of Quebec is no longer the only one in Canada to cultivate the arts. For some years already the Maritime provinces and Ontario have awakened to painting. Much later the Western provinces will follow the same movement, accelerating it somewhat as if to make up lost time. The topographic water color now being in style, it is this kind of painting that first appears in the rest of Canada. In 1759, Richard Short and Hervey Smith occupy their spare time in drawing and painting Halifax and its environs, before going on the Quebec to sketch on the spot the misery of Quebec in ruins. It is therefore an era of water colorists which opens. Canadian painting owes so much of its qualities of precision and of freshness to these artists that it is but right that a few words be devoted to them.
I would enlarge, if I had the time, on the work of a Parkyns or a Peachy, on the works of some holidaying amateur, or on the elegant scenic paintings of the surveyors who occasionnally sketched in water colors. In this class two names make one forget the others: George Heriot and James Pattison Cockburn. The work of the second concerns itself almost entirely with the Province of Quebec; that of George Heriot comprises scenes of Upper and Lower Canada. The exactness of their drawing and the freeness of their style make their water colors works of art as well as purely historical documents.
The first artists of Ontario are, I believe, Lady Simcoe who sketched constantly while travelling, and Wilhelm Berczy, leader of the German colony at Markham (1792) and painter of portraits and church pictures. Like a few others of the same period and of the following era, they were in fact tourists crossing the country - persons curious about everything, noting their visual impressions in their precious sketch books and revealing to us in this way the Canada of other days in its immensity and its silent solitude, in the gentle manners of its colonial homes and the grandeur of its virgin scenery. Such is the career of the artists named above and of a large number of others - Agnes Fitzgibbon, Anna Jameson, Richard Coates, James Hamilton, John Grant, Bainbridge... The best know of these wandering artists, though not the most talented, is William Henry Bartlett, whose paintings are more pleasing than faithful to reality. Very much later the West had its own illustrator, the able, fecund and picturesque Henri Julien.
Among these travellers there are some who draw upon the actual originality and resources of the contry they visit. There are others who, following their families, wander in some region searching for an ideal country of their own. Often some, of one kind or the other, decide to settle among us. Who does not know the Frenchman Georges-Théodore Berthon, the German Otto Jacobi, the Irishman Paul Kane, the American Henry D. Thielcke, the Dutch Jew Cornelius Krieghoff? The first brought us French academicism; the second, the extreme precision and dryness of German photographic paintings; the third, a sort of romanticism by turn lively or melancholic; the fourth, a pleasant facility and restful harmonies, the last, the minor taste of the Dutch genre scene, of popular revels, and of common-place sunsets. Each one of these artists has his own qualities, which it is not right to exaggerate, and develops a style to which he fully contributes the measure of his personality, and a formula to which to attach himself in case of distress. All produced a respectable number of varied works. A few nursed their reputations and prepared their after-life - Krieghoff and Kane, indeed, are claimed by some to be the beginners of Canadian Art. ... And yet, not one of them founded a school. During their lifetime they had two or three faithful imitators devoid of talent; at their death, their art dissolves or remains somnolent.
The same can be said of the numerous painters who came from England, Ireland and the United States, from Italy and Germany, such as Robert Field, James Duncan and John James, Pienovi and Lamprecht... One need not be surprised. For more than a good half of the 19th century there are occurring in Canada the same phenomena which are taking place in Western Europe: pictorial traditions are developing too fast to have a chance of becoming fixed; and in the same generation the influences are so varied that they seem to have no relation whatsoever, in fact they seem to develop in sealed vessels. The world is living faster than before, and to follow it the artist must triple his speed in order not to be outdistanced. On the other hand, none of the foreign masters who settled in Canada possessed sufficient personality to attract hesitant disciples to his following. We must congratulate ourselves in this, for otherwise the Canadian school would have shown only a depairing monotony.
Our painting develops, in a manner hardly perceptible, from the day when our artists leave the country to go and learn their art in Europe, especially in France. The reason is this: beginning with the Second Empire, or perhaps a few years earlier, official art teaching is stabilized in formulae accessible to all, and is rendered uniform to the very degree in which apprentice artists are willing to accept the kind of personal submission which is implied in uniformity. In other words, academicism attained the prestige of a state religion. Do you want to know to which masters our artists flock to perfect themselves in Europe? To Paulin Guérin, Hippolyte Flandrin, Bouguereau and Cabanal, Benjamin Constant, and Robert-Fleury, when it is not to the colorless Grômé... The dissident Naturalist and Impressionist movements no doubt attracted the attention of a few of our students. But on the whole these remained faithful to the academis traditions. The Canadian school avoided perhaps the sadness of monotony but only to fall into an imitation of the European traditional schools, and therefore into the correct and cold greyness of bourgeois painting.
During the first twenty years of our century, European tradition ran its course amongst us but broadened itself a little. From this point it suffered a few inroads upon its supremacy. Some artists studied the glorious unknowns of Barbizon; others became suddenly enthusiastic over Manet and Sisley, sometimes over Monet; a small number secretely admired Van Gogh and Gaugin; even the upholders of the European tradition did not forbid themselves a certain broadening of their doctrines and an ever-widening liberty in the wielding of their brush and in the justaposition of their colors. Sometimes a violent reaction manifested itself in a group of young impatient painters, or in some vague critic almost devoid of readers. About 1915, this tendency expressed itself clearly in the incomparable artist, James Wilson Morrice, and in the uneven but vigorous painter, Marc-Aurèle Fortin. It found further expression, in a self assured manner, among the members of the Group of Seven, whose pictorial self-expression runs all the way from the decorative sumptuousness of Tom Thomson to the cold aridity of Lawren Stewart Harris.
But the true reaction against that we must call academicism, for lack of a better term, is the one in which we now find ourselves living. It is too soon to claim that it will help us reach the end of imitation. But we must agree that this present reaction is full of vitality, of brave effort and of insufferance, and that it combines in a forward movement a pleiad of artists of robust talents whose work is already much more than a mere promise.
