Sélection de ventes notoires de 2023 par Galerie Alan Klinkhoff

“This approaching train is a tribute to one of the major symbols of the industrial era and impressionism, the railway. The motif, immortalized by Monet's series on the Gare Saint Lazare, is transposed to the great Canadian spaces - here in Baie-Saint-Paul, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. This scene takes on a national dimension: the titanic construction of the railroad, linking the territories from east to west, had made possible the building of the country thirty years earlier. Travelling frequently between Quebec City and Paris, Gagnon brought back to France many sketches and drawings made during his winter outings, which he used in large compositions. Northern landscapes became popular within the Parisian public and Gagnon was the first Canadian artist to have a solo exhibition in Paris in 1913.” [1]

At the Musée Fabre in Montpellier where the canvas, Le Train, Hiver, painted directly from our sketch was exhibited, in their press release for the exhibition it was described as above. The canvas, The Train, Winter, owned by the Donald Sobey Collection, was featured prominently in the exhibition and reproduced twice in the catalogue Canada and Impressionism: New Horizons has become synonymous internationally with the best of Clarence Gagnon’s painting. That painting served as a banner for a press release announcing the Lausanne portion of the tour, in countless reviews published overseas during the tour which included in addition to Lausanne, Montpellier and Munich, before going to Ottawa. The Train, Winter was illustrated as the lead work in the magazine of The National Gallery of Canada in March of 2022 promoting the Impressionist exhibit at the Gallery.[2]

The excerpt above also refers to the Clarence Gagnon exhibition in Paris in 1913, a first for a Canadian artist. The available list of paintings and sketches included in the exhibition at Galerie A.M. Reitlinger notes under the #49 a sketch described as The Train. Insofar as existing Gagnon documentation and visuals suggest that this particular work offered here is the only Canadian winter sketch of a train, we think that it is a reasonable hypothesis that our painting was indeed exhibited in that legendary show. The Reitlinger exhibition was a unique exhibition, a kind of performance display in which the walls were painted blue while the 75 Gagnons in the show, the majority winter scenes, were inspired by the Charlevoix region, but not identified with any precise location.

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Footnotes:

[1] Musée Fabre, Le Canada & l'impressionnisme: nouveau horizon, Press Release, September 18, 2020, 16.

[2] Katerina Atanassova, “Canadian Artists in Dialogue with Impressionism,” National Gallery of Canada Magazine, March 1, 2022.