55.9 x 71.1 cm
Further images
Inscriptions
signed, 'R. PILOT' (lower right)Provenance
Acquired from the artist by David Molson, Baie D’Urfé, QuébecBy descent David H. Molson, Toronto
Waddington’s, Canadian Fine Art Auction, May 28, 2018
Roland Dubeau, Quebec City
Private collection, Toronto
Place D’Armes is a highly accomplished and most elegant composition of Quebec City, a city Mario Béland appropriately refers to as a “romantic city”. An art critic of his day, admiringly, wrote of “the ambience of quiet light” his paintings often exude [1]. Pilot’s quiet light accentuates the romance of “his” Quebec City.
The last of the Canadian impressionists, an exhibitor in the first Group of Seven exhibition at the young age of 22, a President of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts and Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), Pilot was very much a prodigy as an artist. An opportunity to see paintings by Pilot as a student at Montreal High School show considerable maturity at age 16. In the early 1920s, possibly upon his return from Concarneau in 1922, Robert Pilot first discovered the painterly virtues of Quebec City. The painterly seduction of Quebec City stimulated his palette regularly over the ensuing 40 years.
‘Painter of Quebec City par excellence, Pilot captured the city in countless drawings, prints and paintings. With affection and nostalgia, he portrayed the historic, romantic city from all angles, in all seasons and at all times of the day in large panoramas and scenes of daily life. His records show that he travelled to Quebec’s capital five or six times per year... In 1961, in an interview for Canadian Art, Pilot expressed his love of the old capital: “I always come back to Quebec. I must have made sixty sketching trips down there and each time it seems to be the most paintable city. It seems to have a spell over me which is brought out by the history embraced in the city itself and also the remains of the very fine architecture and the beauty of the site itself. […] It and Paris are the two cities of the world I like the best.”’ [2]
Mario Béland
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Footnote:
[1] “Robert Wakeham Pilot,” The Gazette (Montreal), December 23, 1967, 19.
[2] Lawrence Sabbath, “Robert Pilot”, Canadian Art, vol. 18, no 5 (September -October 1961), p. 316–317.
