Artworks

Madeleine Rocheleau Boyer exhibited her paintings regularly in the 1960s and 1970s in Montreal and the surrounding region. In an artist statement she wrote, she declared that a deep study of the paintings of the 16th-century Greek artist - known popularly as El Greco - had helped her achieve in her work an objective Edwin Holgate had suggested to her, that being to “try and make a quiet statement.”

Madeleine Boyer, née Rocheleau, originally studied drawings and watercolors at the Sœurs des Saints-Noms-de-Jésus-et-de-Marie convent and then later in Toronto. She subsequently worked in the studios of Edwin Holgate and Ernst Neumann. In 1948, Madeleine Rocheleau pursued her study of drawing at Paris’ La Grande Chaumière. She continued back in Montreal at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts under Arthur Lismer, then with Guy Viau in Ste. Adele and then in 1957, studying drawing and composition with Alfred Pellan.

Madeleine Rocheleau Boyer is perhaps best known as a desirable model for artists in Montreal. Among many of Edwin Holgate’s most exhibited canvases of the nude, including The National Gallery of Canada’s ‘Beginning of Autumn’ of 1938, feature Madeleine Rocheleau as his model for the figure. As an art collector Mme Boyer owned one of the most comprehensive collections of Clarence Gagnon’s etchings.

Some years after Dr. Max Stern of Montreal’s Dominion Gallery was widowed, Madeleine Boyer and Dr. Stern were a couple, Dr. Stern finally moving out of his apartment above the Gallery to the Port Royal Building directly across the street.