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Artworks
Fig. 1. Kathleen Moir Morris, After Grand Mass, Berthier-en-Haut, 1927 (Collection of The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
Kathleen M. MorrisHitching Posts, Berthierville, 1925 (circa)1893-1986Oil on panel10 x 13 1/2 in
25.4 x 34.3 cmSoldFurther images
Inscriptions
signed, 'K. M. Morris' (lower left); titled by the artist to the typed artist's label, 'Rural Quebec' (verso, centre)Provenance
Continental Galleries of Fine Art, Montreal;
Collection of Mrs. Shima (Lafontaine), owner of Continental Galleries;
By descent to a private collection, Canada;
Alan Klinkhoff Gallery;
Acquired from the above by the present private collection, Toronto, March 19, 2019.
Exhibitions
Montreal, Galerie Alan Klinkhoff, Artists in the City, Canada, 18 March - 2 April 2016.
Montreal, Galerie Alan Klinkhoff, Beaver Hall Exhibitions, 2016.
Toronto, Alan Klinkhoff Gallery, Classical Canadian Art, May 2016
Toronto, Alan Klinkhoff Gallery, Lawren Harris & Canadian Masters: Historic Sale Celebrating Canada's 150 Years, 1 April 2017.
Kathleen Morris was accompanied by her mother on these winter sketching trips to towns and villages like Berthierville where she painted these important compositions featuring calèches, churches, and horses. Here, Morris’s energetic brushwork captures the unassuming resplendence of the hitching posts opposite to the Berthierville church and are a testament to her preferred subject matter. Morris herself commented, “I don’t think I showed any evidence of talent until I started drawing horses all over my schoolbooks [sic] ... I love to paint animals.”
Rural Quebec (Hitching Posts, Berthierville) relates to a canvas found in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, entitled After Grand Mass, Berthier-en-Haut. [Fig 1.]. However, in our present sketch, Morris has shifted her view. Instead of the domineering facade of the village church and bustling parishioners, Morris’s sole focus is on the waiting sleigh horses. She keeps the same red found variously on the horses’ blankets, which lend After Grand Mass, Berthier-en-Haut its “festive note”. [1] Years later, in a letter to J. Russell Harper, she reminisced fondly about the scene. “I saw all those horses in front of the nice old church. Sometimes there were as many as three hundred all with different coloured blankets.” [2]
Upon Morris’s death in 1986, her niece, Greata Stethem, wrote of her aunt, “What I remember the most about her was her absolutely irrepressible sense of humor and her great love of animals, which she expressed in her paintings.”3
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Footnotes:
[1] Walters, Beaver Hall Group and Its Legacy, p. 63
[2] Ibid 1, p. 74
[3] Lawrence Sabbath, “Member of the Royal Canadian Academy Montreal artist Kathleen Morris dies”, The Montreal Gazette, 24 December 1986, p. C-14
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