Barachois, Gaspé

“Miss Mount affirms herself here as a very great artist.” [1]

“Outstanding seascapes by Rita Mount…” “There is so much strength in the style and one would never dare to suggest this by a woman …” announced La Presse’s art critic Albert Laberge in the headline to his review of the RCA exhibition of 1929. (In the same exhibition review Laberge also highlights the virtues of Prudence Heward’s now famous Au Théâtre.) [2]

 As the Rita Mount paintings offered here show, along with Marc-Aurèle Fortin and perhaps Robert Pilot, Rita Mount is one of the foremost painters of the Gaspé Peninsula. Perhaps because she never married and appears to have lived virtually her entire life either with her parents or one or another of her siblings, there is little documentation and few letters to aid in a biographical sketch. The greatest resource is her contributions to the annual exhibitions at the Art Association of Montreal where she began to exhibit in 1903 and did so almost without interruption from 1910 through to 1950.

In 1943, five years after her election as an Associate of the RCA, the Musée du Québec presented an exhibition of Mount’s paintings of the Gaspé and Cape-Breton area, a region she appears to have visited for the first time in 1920 and returned almost annually during her career. It is precisely the kind of compositions offered in our sale which would have been featured in the Quebec exhibition. Acclaimed Quebec curator Paul Rainville, for whom there was a significant spiritual component to Mount’s artistic process and resulting creations, was nothing short of poetic in his admiration. He wrote: 

“Rita Mount succeeds in capturing parcels of infinity and affixes them definitively onto her canvas [...] we see that on the flat, square surface of her little canvas, she manages to contain the immensity of the sky and sea, glowing beneath a fiery sun like the “brilliant shadow of God,” to paraphrase the poet.”

«[Rita Mount] réussit à capter des parcelles d'infini, pour les fixer définitivement sur la toile [...] et l’on voit que sur la surface plane du carré de sa petite toile, elle réussit à faire tenir l’immensité du ciel et de la mer embrasés sous les feux d’un soleil qui semble comme “l’ombre éclatante de Dieu”, pour parler comme le poète ». [3] 

“ It is therefore particularly pleasing to us to bring to town, to the Museum of Quebec, with the Rita Mount exhibition, this splendid Gaspésie [...] which seems to fill our rooms, with the wind from the sea, with all the freshness of its salty air and its intoxicating kelp ; with all the splendor of its sunshine and its incomparable light of its captivating cliffs, and with the enchantment of its lulling stream.”

«Il nous est donc particulièrement agréable d’amener en ville, au Musée de Québec, avec l’exposition Rita Mount, cette Gaspésie splendide [...] qui semble remplir nos salles, avec le vent du large, de toute la fraîcheur de son air salin et de son varech enivrant ; de toute la splendeur de son soleil et sa lumière incomparables de ses falaises captivantes, et de l’enchantement de son flot berceur ». [4]

Rita Mount was born in 1888 in Montreal, Quebec. Her interest in art began early at the age of ten. Years later, she took art lessons from Montreal painter George Delfosse. Mount studied in Paris at the Cercle Internationale des Beaux-Arts and at the Atelier Delécluze. Later, after being awarded a two-year scholarship, Mount studied in Canada under William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal. She also took a course in landscape painting in Woodstock, NY under John Fabian Carlson and studied at the Art Students League of New York under Frank DuMond. After completing her studies, Mount returned to Canada and established a studio in Montreal.

In 1934, Mount motored to Banff, sketching on the way. She traveled further west in 1937, as far as Victoria and on her way home stopped in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. With the exception of the 1934 and 1937 trips west, from 1920 she painted almost exclusively compositions of Montreal where she lived and subject matter she discovered on annual trips eastward to the Gaspé and on to Cape Breton. 

Rita Mount was honored with solo exhibitions at the Art Association of Montreal in 1934 and at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in 1943. Her work was also been on display at Continental Galleries, Watson Art Galleries, Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Morency Frères Ltée., all in Montreal, and included in a number of group shows eg. Ontario Society of Artists, Art Association of Montreal, Royal Canadian Academy (she was elected A.R.C.A. in 1938), New York World’s Fair in 1939, Coronation Exhibition in London, England, British Empire Overseas Exhibition 

Paintings by Rita Mount are represented in the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 

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Biography sourced from www.klinkhoff.ca

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Footnotes

[1] "Des œuvres remarquables au salon du printemps," La Presse (Montréal), 5 April 1924, 23.

[2] Albert Laberge, "Nouvelle visite au Salon de l'Académie Royale Canadienne. Remarquables scènes de la mer par Rita Mount, magistral portrait de femme par Wayman Adams, et scènes des champs par 

James Graham." La Presse, 6  December 1929, 17.

[3] Paul Rainville, Exposition des peintures de Rita Mount, A.R.C.A. : La Gaspésie et le Cap-Breton (Québec: Musée de la province de Québec, 1943), 3.

[4] Ibid., 6