PROVENANCE
The Reader's Digest Collection
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 25, 2005, lot 137
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Hugues de Jouvancourt, Marc-Aurèle Fortin, 1980, pages 32, 36 and 42, a similar work titled Landscape at St. Simeon reproduced page 132

St-Siméon is a town on the St. Lawrence River, in Charlevoix County, Quebec. Marc-Aurèle Fortin, whether based in Montreal or Sainte-Rose, wandered the Quebec countryside that he so loved to paint. Fortin was rather eccentric, and Hugues Jouvancourt recounts that as a young man, “His painting trips were made on a ramshackle bicycle to which his painting gear was tied on with string.… In Sainte-Rose, there was much talk about this good-natured painter.”

Jouvancourt also comments that from about 1935, for several years, Fortin painted many watercolours, for which his favourite subjects were Baie Saint-Paul, the Gaspé Peninsula, Lac Saint-Jean, Charlevoix and, of course, Sainte-Rose. In this classic composition, the scene descends over rolling hills into the town at the water’s edge, building up concentrated layers of houses. Fortin was interested in the pattern the roof peaks made against each other and against the open expanse of hills, water and sky beyond. A similar watercolour from 1942, Landscape at St. Siméon, is in the collection of the Musée du Québec.

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