Lot 165: James Wilson Morrice 1865 - 1924 Canadian oil on

James Wilson Morrice 1865 - 1924 Canadian oil on board Brittany 4 7/8 x 6 1/8 inches 12.4 x 15.6 centimeters on verso initialed W.J.M. and stamped Studio J.W. Morrice Provenance:W. Scott & Sons, Montreal Dr. Francis J. Shepherd MD, LLD, FRCS By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario Typical of the small pochades James Wilson Morrice is so famous for, this panel stands apart for its simple composition and tour-de-force harmony of three colours; the fourth, the warm shade of the wall, is the bare wood, delicately tinted by green paint rubbed in the grooves. The stones are light grey passages and the street is toned down, underlining the vivid trio of white, black and emerald green, applied straight from the tube. The use of only three colours and the rubbing technique relates this work to the sketches that Morrice painted in Montreal and Quebec City in early 1906. It was a technique that he used because the extreme cold froze his paints. He tried to quicken the process by using just black, white and a third colour - either ultramarine, dark red or yellow. The use of bright paint to define the forms could also owe something to the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, which revealed the work of the Fauves, in particular Matisse, to the world. Morrice exhibited four sketches in an adjacent room at the same exhibition. We know that Morrice traveled to Normandy and Brittany in 1906, and the corresponding drawing was found in Morrice's Sketchbook #16 (Dr.1973.39, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, page 42). Careful study of the subjects of this sketchbook, in which we follow Morrice from Venice to Canada via Normandy and Brittany, suggest a trip to Brittany from mid-July to mid-September 1906. The panel is inscribed with the initials W.J.M., perhaps denoting William James Morrice, the artist's elder brother. Dr. Francis J. Shepherd, the famous Montreal doctor and art collector who owned this painting, was known to be the Morrice family physician. It is possible that this work was exhibited in the Art Association of Montreal's 1925 exhibition entitled Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the late James W. Morrice, RCA and also its Memorial Exhibition of Paintings and Bronzes from the Collection of the Late Francis J. Shepherd MD, LLD, FRCS in 1929. We thank Lucie Dorais for contributing the above essay and for her assistance in cataloguing this work. Dorais is currently compiling a catalogue raisonné on the artist's work.