Artworks

In March 1928 Jackson returned to Baie Saint-Paul and on 19 March he wrote to Arthur Lismer: “Baie St. Paul smothered in snow, and more falling. It does not excite me very much. Too closed in., but I could not get to St. Urbain on account of smallpox and I have not been vaccinated since I was in the army so I stayed here. Robinson and Hewton are coming to-night and I expect to stick around a week.” (McMichael Canadian Art Collection)

The architecture of the Lower Saint Lawrence villages was a constant attraction for Jackson and here farmhouses and barns line the meandering road that follows the curves of the rolling landscape. But he has turned his back on the village of Baie Saint Paul, looking north west along the banks of the rivière du Gouffre leading to the unattainable Saint-Urbain, the subject of Clarence Gagnon’s famous 1925 canvas, Village in the Laurentians (National Gallery of Canada). The parallel diagonals of the foreground road, low hills and river bank are connected by the road and sleigh leading to the bright orange farmhouse at the right. As in the best of Jackson’s Charlevoix canvases, architecture and landscape are one. The clouds, hilltops, river banks, buildings, road and fence posts are all characterized by a similar flowing rhythm.

The canvas closely follows Jackson’s initial oil sketch (fig. 1), formerly in the collection of his somewhat distant cousin and friend Edna Breithaupt who he had first met in Berlin, Ontario (now Kitchener) before the First World War. Even the racing horse and sleigh and sunlit clouds upper left were included in the sketch though he enhanced the textures of the hills and river banks in the canvas and heightened the orange and yellows of the barns and house and clear light on the foreground snow.

This canvas was reproduced on the cover of the important exhibition, A.Y. Jackson Thirty Years of Painting held at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal in May 1946.

Charles C. Hill for Alan Klinkhoff Gallery
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