Sold for: $37,250

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Acquired from the above in the 1940s
By descent to the present Private Collection, Montreal

LITERATURE
Michèle Grandbois, editor, Marc-Aurèle Fortin: The Experience of Colour, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2011, essay by François-Marc Gagnon, page 157

As a young man, Marc-Aurèle Fortin was sent by his father to work on a farm in Sainte-Thérèse as a punishment for his lack of interest in scholastic matters. However, Fortin enjoyed the experience, and it cultivated in him a love of Quebec’s rural life that would stay with him the rest of his days. As François-Marc Gagnon wrote, it was the countryside “that provided the opportunity to find the purest form of the French-Canadian national character. This idea was promoted by the friends of ‘terroir,’ including a number of painters of L’Arche with whom Fortin associated.” In the Village includes a man in the street carrying a scythe, likely returning from work in the fields. But just as important as people for Fortin in his concept of “terroir” were villages like this, with their simple clapboard houses, shaded by the elm trees, surrounded by cultivated fields and grounded in the earth. In the Village is richly coloured, and Fortin’s brushwork is fluid and assured, describing with sensitivity the peaceful rustic landscape he held in such great regard.

This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist’s work, #H-1080.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars