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In Summer St-Eustache, Maurice Cullen transforms a modest rural landscape into an extraordinary portrait of reflections. The water is nearly a perfect mirror of colours, contrasting vivid green trees with the golden foliage that signals the arrival of autumn and the creamy white walls and orange roofs of buildings along the shore. The crisp lines of the reflection of the building on the far left form a sharp contrast with the softer silhouettes of the trees, but all the forms are carefully distinct, as if to suggest that the river itself is as still as glass. Toward the right, as the waterway opens up, the reflections of the land begin to fade away and the water instead takes on the warm blue hue of the sky, with gentle muted gray shadows of clouds. 

The painting is one of many that Cullen painted at Saint-Eustache, a town approximately thirty-five kilometres northwest of Montreal. In 1905, Cullen and William Brymner (1855–1925) built a studio there, and they painted there together many times in the years leading up to the First World War, often visiting in the summer and autumn and occasionally welcoming other artists there. They may have been drawn to the area because they saw connections to the landscapes they had painted in France and near Beaupré; in spring 1905, the Montreal Daily Star reported that in the coming weeks Cullen would be exploring landscapes in Quebec “which, to his mind, is almost as prolific in good subjects as Brittany, where he spent a season a year or two ago.” [1] The associations Cullen made between Quebec and France are indicative of his desire to bring his experience with modern art in Europe to the work that he was doing in Canada, including his focus on modern landscapes. 

While the exact location of the studio is unknown today, it was likely near the River du Chêne. [2] The river appears in several of the paintings the men created at Saint-Eustache, and although both artists experimented with capturing reflections, Cullen’s Summer St-Eustache is one of the most ambitious compositions, suggesting it is the result of an intense study of the summer light. The painting was part of a series that the artist submitted to a group show at the Art Association of Montreal in December 1906, an exhibition that was a strong critical success—the works on display were deemed “among the best seen at the Gallery for some time” and Cullen’s Saint-Eustache paintings were variously described as “brilliant and effective” and featuring “superb” reflections. [3] 

By 1906, Cullen had already established his reputation as an artist who specialized in winter landscapes—it was those works that dominated his exhibition submissions to the AAM and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and critics often focused on analyzing his talents as a painter of snow and ice. His work at Saint-Eustache demonstrates that he was also deeply interested in light and water in other seasons; paintings like Summer St-Eustache and Été à Saint-Eustache, c. 1906 (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec) reveal his efforts to capture subtle variations in greens and the diversity of shadows on land and water cast by strong summer sunlight. In the latter work, the reflections in the water are dominated by the shade of the trees, and distinctive brushstrokes suggest ripples of movement. 

The Saint-Eustache paintings date to an important period of professional development for Cullen. He had travelled in Europe from April 1900 to the autumn of 1902, and on returning to Montreal he began to focus increasingly on depicting landscapes in Quebec. Critics professed to see significant developments in his art; for instance, a report in the Montreal Herald in December 1904 claimed he had made incredible progress in the last year, and “He achieves now a very fine sense of color, in which in the past he was often crude and glaring; he has developed a smooth use of his pigments, which used to be put in with extreme unevenness; and while his sunlight is still very muddy at times and his trees too solid, he has acquired a control of the softer atmospheric tones that gives his work a very poetical effect…. for a year’s growth his advance is startling.” [4] Notwithstanding the critic’s harsh assessment of Cullen’s early work, it is clear that with paintings such as Summer St-Eustache and Été à Saint-Eustache Cullen was achieving remarkable subtleties and delicacy. He was widely respected by his peers, and in 1907 he was elected an academician of the RCA and invited to become a founding member of the Canadian Art Club. 

Jocelyn Anderson

Jocelyn Anderson is the Deputy Director of the Art Canada Institute. Her research focuses on Canadian art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and more broadly on landscape imagery in the British Empire. She is the author of William Brymner: Life & Work, as well as essays for a number of periodicals including British Art Studies and the Oxford Art Journal. She holds a PhD from the University of London (Courtauld Institute of Art).

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Footnotes: 

[1] “By Two Canadian Artists,” Montreal Daily Star, May 20, 1905, 6. 

[2] Lydia Bouchard, “Les paysages québécois de William Brymner, expérience de la nature comme lieu identitaire canadien au tournant du XXe siècle,” (Master’s thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2009), 48. 

[3] “Exhibit of Local Painters at Gallery,” Montreal Daily Star, December 28, 1906, 13.

[4] “Maurice Cullen’s Growth Is Rapid,” Montreal Herald, December 9, 1904, clipping in Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Archives Press Clippings, 34 vols., 5:29.