Artworks

This triumph in paint by Maurice Cullen was accomplished shortly after his return from Paris. It was painted circa 1896 and conceivably 1897. Notably, it is painted on a support, one we would refer to as canvas board, one made in Paris by an art supplies store G. Sennelier, at the time and still today on Quai Voltaire, conveniently located on the left bank directly across the Seine’s Pont du Carrousel from the school at the Louvre.

The location is today impossible to identify with precision. Cullen’s intent is far from documentary, however the composition suggests that the location is in the area of Quebec City’s Cap Diamant, below the Citadel, Lower Town, one might speculate from a vantage point pretty much in the centre of the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s monumental and monumentally important Cullen canvas of Cap Diamant.

This is the painting that served as the sketch for one of the finest Maurice Cullen paintings to come to the market, a canvas owned since 1946 by a most distinguished collector, Francois Dupre who hung the canvas in his Montreal home.

This sketch is also closely related to ‘Cap Diamant’, an often illustrated masterpiece by Maurice Cullen sold by Walter Klinkhoff Gallery decades ago to Power Corporation of Canada.