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Artworks
Albert H. RobinsonOpen Stream in Spring, 19271881-1956$20,000Inscriptions
signed and dated, ‘Albert H. Robinson 27’ (lower right)Provenance
Continental Galleries Inc., Montreal, Inventory no. 7381
Private collection, Westmount, Quebec
The painting of 1927 offered here is a work Robinson “painted up” very much directly into a larger composition the following year and which since 1929 is owned by The Hamilton Art Gallery (Fig. 1). This meandering Gouffre River was featured in a Robinson canvas exhibited at the Musee du Jeu de Paume in Paris, 1927 at the Exposition D’Art Canadien when it was purchased by the French Government for the musée du Luxembourg (Fig. 2).
It was on A.Y. Jackson’s first sketching trip on the South Shore just past Quebec City that he “... wrote letters to Albert Robinson, urging him to come and to my joy he arrived one evening. There was something about Robinson that melted all reserve as the frost disappears and when the sun rises.”[1] Jackson and Robinson were seduced by the composition the region provided and returned, often staying on the North Shore, along in the region of Baie St Paul on the Gouffre River and overlooking the St Lawrence River and also La Malbaie, also in Charlevoix County. It is the colour, character and architecture of this area which inspired many of Robinson’s finest paintings.
Hamilton is where the artist was born in 1881 and became Chief Illustrator for the Hamilton Times, before pursuing a formal art training in Paris in 1903 at the Académie Julian and subsequently at the École des Beaux-Arts. Paris was where Robinson became fully exposed to the masters of French Impressionism.
His first paintings were exhibited at the Royal Canadian Academy in 1909. In 1911, at age 30, he became one of the youngest members to be elected associate of the R.C.A.. That same year A.Y. Jackson and Robinson boarded an Allan Line ship heading to Le Havre to paint in the region for a few months. He became a full member of the R.C.A. in 1920, the same year he exhibited alongside the Group of Seven in their first exhibition as one of three guest exhibitors, Randolph Hewton and Robinson's good friend, Robert Pilot. That same year an Albert Robinson was purchased as a foundation painting, with works by 5 other artists, for the Quebec Museum which would open only four years later.
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Footnote:
[1] A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, 1958), 57.
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