Sold for: $67,250

PROVENANCE
Galerie de Bellefeuille, Montreal
Acquired from the above by the present Private Estate, Montreal

LITERATURE
Nancy Tousley and Mayo Graham, Joe Fafard: The Bronze Years, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1996, pages 31 and 32, reproduced page 52

Joe Fafard began his artist series around 1982. By the mid-1980s, he was casting these works in bronze, having built his own foundry at Pense in 1985. Fafard stated about this series, “I feel a bit like a writer who is evoking a character, I feel a bit like an actor who is interpreting a character, I feel like an artist who’s making a portrait.” In this depiction of Claude Monet, the famous French Impressionist, we have a sense of the artist in his maturity—very sure of himself and his accomplishments, and caught in a reflective mood, as if pausing with a cigarette to consider one of his paintings. His body is robust, and his stance of feet slightly apart makes him seem firmly planted on the earth.

While growing up in the town of Sainte-Marthe in Saskatchewan, Fafard was an altar boy, and he cleaned the statues of the saints in the Catholic church there. Nancy Tousley relates, “Fafard compares his figures of artists to the community of saints in the Church, wherein each saint represents a special trait symbolized by an attribute.” Monet, depicted in harmonious shades of grey, is the saint of light and atmosphere.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars