In the 2006 Annual Report of Power Financial Corporation, Paul Maréchal, Curator of the Power Corporation of Canada Collection, wrote:

This painting  [Chapeau rond] was painted during the artist’s second long stay in France, which began in 1958. He established his studio in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a medieval village on the Côte d’Azur that, starting in the 1920s, had become an artistic centre, attracting such painters as Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Calder and Chagall. Dallaire’s emphasis on simplified forms no doubt arose from his increasing interest in abstraction.

The artists working in Paris at that time, later known as the “Paris School of Painters,” included Riopelle, de Staël, Zao Wou-ki, Vieira da Silva and several others. These artists did influence Dallaire’s work to a certain extent: he dabbled in surrealism but was essentially a figurative painter. The composition of this head-and-shoulders view recalls medieval religious paintings. However, the artist subverts the commonly accepted meaning of the leafy halo to create a divinity imbued with qualities as earthly as they are surrealist. During his stays in France, Dallaire found his subject matter—radically modified in his paintings—on regular visits to numerous museums. [1]

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Footnotes: 

[1] Power Financial Corporation, Annual Report 2006 (Montreal: Power Financial Corporation, 2007), 94.