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Home , James Wilson Morrice, Maurice Prendergast, Robert Pilot, William Brymner

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JAMES WILSON MORRICE 7?

ByDONALD W.BUCHANAN

THE RYERSON PRESS MOUNTAIN HILL, Collection: Mrs. Howard Pillow, JAMES WILSON MORRICE

HE first Canadian painter to plunge into the clear stream of T the living art of our day was) ames Wilson Morrice. A gener­ ation in advance of his contemporaries in , he possessed during his lifetime no immediate followers. Yet to-day his memory is revered by all those Canadian painters who asp1re both to sound and original expression. His birthplace was MontreaL the year 1865. He died in , N orth Africa, in 1924, Forever a wanderer, from the days when he first deserted law school in Toronto to take up art studies in , he seemed continually to be moved by some inner compulsion, which drove him in progression from Canada to , from Paris to Venice, from the Mediterranean to the West Indies. This was something which he himself never attempted to explain. Yet, despite his many reticences, he should not be regarded either as a man of mystery or as a recluse. On the contrary, he was a wit and a cultured conversationalist, a lover of good music, of fine food, of gay company. During his frequent sojourns in Paris, where he maintained a studio, he mingled in some of the most cosmopolitan society of his day. His range of acquaintanceship was wide. Somerset Maugham and Arnold Bennett, for example, both knew him well an d have recorded their memories of him in several novels. Thus the character Priam Farll in Bennett's Buried Alive bears a distinct resemblance to the Canadian. Also in the published journals of Bennett, there are several direct references, as in this entry, for Paris, May 16, 1905 : • 1 ''Morrice dined with me and stayed till one a.m. He has had the joy of life in a high degree and he likes living alone. ·I enjoy everything,' he said. ·I got up this morning and I saw an old woman walking along and she was the finest old woman I ever did see. She was a magnificent old woman, and I was obliged to make a sketch of her. Then there was the _marchand de quatre saisons. His cry is beautiful. I began to enjoy myself almost immediately I got out of bed. It is a privilege to be alive'." That was one aspect of the man. But there \-Vere others, which were not quite so idyllic. Some of them are described by Maugham in his novel Of Human Bondage (where he attributes them to a character named Cronshaw). Here we see him, as Maugham remembers him, seated at a cafe table in the evening: ·'He mingled wisdom and nonsense in the most astounding manner, gravely making fun of his hearers at one moment, and at the next playfully giving them sound advice. He talked of art, and literature and life. He was by turns devout and obscene, merry and lachrymose. He grew remarkably drunk and then he began to recite poetry. . . . '' · Yet these accounts, amusing and sympathetic as they are, nevertheless reflect only the mere surface, the outward idiosyn­ cracies, of the man. To penetrate to the hard core of his character we must study and understand him as a painter. There alone is the expression of his inner purpose revealed. It is to be found neither in the records of his conversation nor in those stories of his heavy drinking, lea~t of all in the few laconic letters he wrote to his friends. It is here instead in his canvases, glowing with light, and in his multitude of small oil sketches on wooden panels, These were reality to him. Each day, whether in a Canadian city in deep zero weather or on a North African beach in the heavy heat of the south, he would sit down at cafe table or bench in a park to produce an oil sketch. These he did almost regularly 2.

towards the same hour, about five o'clock in the afternoon. Through them he seemed to integrate the life of his sensations and to make existence bearable. These tiny and exquisite panels were more than mere colour studies; they were rather finished compositions, in the tradition of Constable's landscape sketches. In his studio. he would translate these sketches into the compositions of his larger canvases. These however, were far more than simply enlargements of the sketches. They were, in fact, new creations with a distinctive rhythm of their own. of personal colour and vibrant line. This was not the scientific naturalism of the impressionist painters of his day. To explain his approach, I have written elsewhere a detailed comparison between the original sketch and the completed easel of a subject, entitled IcE BRIDGE OvER THE ST. LAw­ RENCE. Both sketch and canvas are in the collection of the Art Association of Montreal. I quote from my book, james Wilson Morrice, a Biography: ··The sketch. which was done in the open air. possesses local atmosphere and detail: it bears clearly indicated each individual house on the opposite bank of the river. also various boats which are frozen in the ice: its values are sharp and varied enough to allow an illusion of recession to the landscape. In the canvas these values, however, have been softened to a more even pitch, the houses have been turned into a highly arbitrary and undulating design across the background. the boats have been made broad patches of colour, while the sleigh in the foreground becomes a decorative fixture and the ice at the bottom of the picture curls up in a rhythm that is complementary to that of the houses at the top." His voyages remain recorded for us, to the extent that we have been able to trace his work, in at least five hundred small oil panels and about two hundred finished canvases. scattered in 4• -w 1 -a.. zw collections, public and private, over two continents. A horse and sleigh entering a Quebec village, dark shaw led Italian \vomen in the public gardens at Venice, an Arab with a donkey on the beach at , a group of French artisans on a Sunday outing along the banks of the Seine: such are the subjects. Diverse enough they are, and yet alike. Over each hangs an atmosphere, to describe a visual sensation all too inadequately in \Vords, of dreamlike and languid meditation. There is also a sense of humour, a secondary association of whimsy in many of his com­ posltlons. ·'He said he liked to put a little humour into his paintings,'' states Gabriel Thompson, the Welsh artist, \Vho was one of his friends. ·'He pointed out to me the two red-trousered soldiers placed jauntily in the middle of the race-course picture and he said he had put them here to make people smile.'' The first ten years of his apprenticeship to art from the time about 1890, \vhen he left law school in Toronto, to the period about 1900, when his first important paintings were being hung in exhibitions in Montreal and Paris and London, was spent mainly in F ranee. Almost as soon as he had found his footing in Paris, he took a few brief lessons from that sound painter of sober, restrained landscapes, Henri Harpignies. That, however, was only an opening interlude, for afterwards, he began to work very much on his own, taking what he could learn from studying in the museums, \vhere he was moved particularly by the land­ scapes of the English painter Bonington. Elsewhere he observed and was influenced by the works of the impressionists and also those of Whistler. His independent talent was strong and was soon recognized. Louis Vauxcelles, the French critic, writing in 1907, said that, since the death of Whistler, Morrice was the first .. orth American painter to have obtained in France and in Paris any great and \veil-merited place in the world of art. These claims to distinction were not transitory, they gre\v 6 . .. c - ~ ] d

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10. *Reproduced on page J 1 :r: u w<( c:fl w :r t- chosen for him. Most of his companions at the University of Toronto, where he spent four years, remembered him as a shy gentle lad, who yet when the occasion favoured it could become the very spirit of fun. At college he acquired a passion for playing the flute, which was to stay with him throughout life. His first water colours were also done at this time, but about these he was more reticent. While at Osgoode Hall, however, he picked up courage enough to send a painting to the annual exhi­ bition of the Ontario Society of Artists. This was accepted. There followed stimulating talks with . who was already teaching art in Montreal: conversations, too, with the great collector, Sir William Van Horne (then president of the ) who encouraged him. The decision to go to Europe to study art was made shortly after his graduation from law school. With the help of Sir William, he obtained his father's consent and the necessary funds for the trip. Proceeding first to Wales and Holland, he ultimately settled down in Paris. There, within a year or two he was com­ pletely at home. Among the gayer spirits with whom he made friends was the Australian painter, Charles Condor, who could say, "Mon dieu, Seigneur, how I hate men and like all women (pretty ones).'' Condor was a character close to his heart. Both men wished to concentrate on the fleeting stimulants and beauties of existence, to forget the rude machinery of living and the politics of mankind. On the other hand, these tastes for exoticism in expression which characterized many of the young men of the nineties, who followed the ··art for art's sake·' cui t of Beardsley and Wilde, did not make any lasting appeal to the Canadian. As an artist, he was already more attuned to the outlook of his young American friend, , with whose tender lyricism in painting his own work was closely 12. T HE BARBER SHOP Collection: C. J. Cote, Montreal a llied. These two artists were often together both in Paris and in Venice.

As for his Canadian friends, the ones to whom he was always attached were William Brymner and Maurice Cullen. On his frequent visits to Canada, he used to go sketching with them either at Ste. Anne de Beaupre or on the Ile d'Orleans. Never • 13 in the presence of these Canadian scenes was his capacity for wonder and for whimsical amusement lost. Always there re­ mained the naive delight of the child in sleighs and in snow­ covered roads. The steep curved streets of Quebec City figure largely in his Canadian compositions, these and winter lanes in the adjacent countryside .. It was in these Canadian paintings, that he first introduced that gentle, almost imperceptible, pinkish glow into the back­ ground of his colouring, which would be repeated thereafter in most of his other canvases. He discovered it first in these early studies he did in the nineties of the skies of his native Quebec. It is something peculiarly Canadian, that touch of ruddiness in the atmosphere, especially on winter days. As a French critic wrote:-''There is much charm in the landscapes of James Wilson Morrice. Among the gray clouds covering his skies, he scatters a rose of exquisite delicacy that he was the first ... to employ.,· That was Paris, the year 1911. Yet at about the same time his academic colleagues in Canada were still looking at Quebec and Ontario landscapes with clouded visions, based on derivative studies of the Dutch and Barbizon schools. The contrast is amusing: it does not need to be underlined. The feeling which Morrice had for Canadian landscape, particularly its winter atmosphere, was true. He saw the landscapes of his native land as intimately as any had done before him. and despite the accepted power of some \vho have followed, he remains to date our finest and most sensitive landscape artist. For a long time, however, there was in Canada a complete lack of any true understanding of his work. At first many of his earlier paintings \vere bought by Montreal collectors but after 1910 much less interest was shown. His later works only began to be accepted in Canada many years after his death. This time lag in Canada between public performance in the arts and public 14 . u [.L) co [.L) :J Cl >--~ cG j cG [.L) •t [..L. ~ LI) ~ :t - r- appreciation of that performance was a constant source of annoy­ ance to Morrice. His refusal to be limited in his art by the bounds of Canadian appreciation or, in his personal behaviour. by the Presbyterian conventions of the Montreal society from which he took his origins. explains partly why he became so much the uprooted citizen, so much the wanderer from continent to continent. in search of new stimulus, of changing scenes and varied contacts. This quality of vagabondage which he possessed has been aptly described by Henri Matisse. the French artist and master of modern painting, who was his friend. In a letter dated 1915 and addressed to Armand Dayot, editor of an art magazine In Paris, Matisse wrote: "About fifteen years ago I passed two winters in Tangiers in company with Morrice .... He was, as a man, a true gentleman. a good companion. with much wit and humour. He had, every­ one knows, an unfortunate passion for whiskey. Despite that, we were, outside of our hours of work, always together. I used to go with him to a cafe where I drank as many glasses of mineral water as he took glasses of alcohol. . . . I do not know what else to tell you. He was a Canadian of Scottish origin, of a rich family, himself very rich, but he never showed it. He was always over hill and dale, a little like a migrating bird but without any very fixed landing-place.·· Matisse in this same letter refers to Morrice as the ··artist with the delicate eye, so pleasing with a touching tenderness in the rendering of landscapes of closely allied values." That such an accurate estimate of his qualities as a painter should have come from the pen of Matisse is appropriate. These two men, after alL had very much in common in their belief that the sensual handling of pigment, the mastery by the painter of his brush, was the prime requisite to be placed first above all other con­ siderations. To this, of course, Matisse added his O\\'n creative 16. TANGIERS, THE BEACH Collection: Mrs . W . H . Clark-Kennedy, Montreal experiments in the use of colour as a major element in design. By influence he drew Morrice to a limited extent along this same road of experiment, but only so far and no further. The few paintings by the Canadian, such as HousE IN SANTIAGO, CuBA now in the Tate Gallery, London, England, which show signs of this approach, were not very successful, and Morrice made only a few excursions in this direction. • 17 As John Lyman in his essay on Morrice (published in French. Les Editions de l'Arbre, MontreaL 1945) has explained (the translation is mine): ''Also there is no real resemblance betVv'een his painting and that of Matisse. Better than any written commentary, the two painters have left us, as if by design in order to remove any possible illusion on this score, two compositions on incidental subjects. Morrice has put flower pots on the windo\v sill of his WINDOW AT T ANGlERS, the same as Matisse has done (in his composition of the same scene), and beyond that the same build­ ings and gardens, and in the background the same to\vn fronted by the sea . . . but it is another world. In that of Matisse every­ thing is subordinated to a formal arabesque which, like a garden laid out in the French manner, indicates to the mind what is absolute and certain: that of Morrice is similar to an English garden which, neglecting to impose upon nature any static forms, allows the mind to dream at will.··

In Canada, the Group of Seven came after Morrice, and A. Y. Jackson was in a sense one of his disciples. Yet \\:hile that strict creed of nationalism, as stated by the Group of Seven, was foreign to Morrice, he nevertheless always insisted upon an honest understanding of the colours and atmosphere of his native land. This comes out clearly in a letter \\rhich he wrote in 1910 to a friend in Toronto about the work of Maurice Cullen. ·'As you say," he states, "these English dealers with their ghostly Dutch monochromes have poisoned everything. Healthy, lusty colour which you see in Canada is no doubt considered vulgar. Cullen, I see from the Montreal papers, has painted a good picture of St. John's, Newfoundland. He is the man in Canada who gets at the guts of things.'' He here anticipates by several years various similar comments to be made by Jackson about Canadian skies and Dutch land­ scapes. The link, however, is no closer than this. When, for 18 • LANDSCAPE, TRINIDAD Colleclwn. The ational Gallery of Canada example, in 1919, Lawren Harris and]. E. H. MacDonald were finding.new inspiration in the riotous autumn foliage of the wilds of . Algoma, Morrice had forsaken Canada entirely. Before he had returned on fairly regular winter visits. He had sketched the snow-bound villages of the lower St. Lawrence and the old squares of Montreal. But at last he had lost interest in his native city. "What the hell is the matter with them in Mont­ reaL" he asked and Edwin Holgate about this time, "why don't they buy modern painting?" So in the winter of 1920-21 we find him painting not in Canada but in Trinidad instead. Here now. on the sunny tropical beaches near Port of Spain, he seemed to find happiness and a fresh release of the spirit. Under these southern skies, his brush flourished with renewed vigour. In his full maturity a new syn­ thesis was bef~re him. There emerged in these paintings, a calligraphic design of broad strokes of pure colour. As one critic wrote: "sea and beach and cliffs are reduced by him almost to decoratively arranged symbols.·· These creations of his prime, these canvases of lush foliage, of tropical waters and sandy coves, were not exhibited in Canada, however, until many years afterward. During the early nineteen thirties, when they began to be shown in MontreaL they helped by their stimulus and example to give various younger Canadian painters the courage and inspiration to move forwards towards a more unfettered art, free from irrelevant theories and dogma. In that sense, he can to-day be regarded as the forerunner of much that is most vital and independent in contemporary Can­ adian painting.

20 • 1. THE TECHNIQUE OF HIS OIL SKETCHES ON WOODEN PANELS*

The method which Morrice followed in the preparation of his sketches was highly personal. The compositions which he turned out on small pieces of white wood were midway between pochades, defined as rapid records of visual impressions, and organized sketches of landscape, such as those which Constable, the English artist, the founder of modern , did so well. Alexander Jamieson, \\rho knew the Canadian about 1896, recalls that his small compositions were already much admired at that date; he, moreover, claims that the present method of making outdoor sketches in oils on panels, as practised so freely by students to-day, is derived almost directly from Morrice. Jamieson adds that Morrice himself doubtless obtained the idea of making little sketches in the open-air from Gaston La Touche, a contem­ porary French artist, who loved to paint pictures of groups of people beside fountains and ponds. La Touche was noted for his exquisite small sketches, true pochades or colour notes of the tones of \Vater and of foliage. Morrice knew that La Touche \Vent out with brush and a collection of small canvases to catch nature in her secrets; he doubtless had seen his sketches. But if he began by imitating the Frenchman, he soon developed an approach of his o\vn. His studies became, not notes on canvas, but finished compositions on \Vood, which, while no larger than miniatures, were nevertheless as free in their handling as had been any sketch by Constable, or any painting by Manet. Here is the local atmosphere, grey with a suave flush of green­ ness, if it is a public garden in Paris, or colder and more metallic, if it is a view of ice on the river from the terrace at Quebec. The *These notes on the technique of the artist are reprinted from my biography of James Wilson Morrice (The Ryerson Press, 1936.) e21 surface quality of the pigment is always smooth and gentle: it is like a fine glove to the fingers. The wood enhances this tactile character: the panels seem made to be felt as well as to be touched. As a precious stone is irradiant so also are these surfaces. The scenes represented, despite the trueness of the atmosphere. are never mere illustrations. Lamp-posts on a street, the figure of a \\'Oman \vearing long skirts, these and many other shapes are indicated by certain mannerisms of his brush, quick twirls that stand as symbols for a bonnet and a face, a dog, or the head and mane of a horse, and remain as signatures to a hundred panels that have never otherwise been signed. ·'Morrice, so far as I know,'' stated Muriel Ciolkovvski, \vriting in the Canadian Forum after his death, "\vas never seen to carry visible painting kit, his complete outfit consisting of a small box which could fit like a cigar case into one of the pockets of his dapper tweed suit and which held his panels, his brushes and a made-out palette." According to other observers. the brushes were sometimes carried separately-there \vere generally only three of them­ in a black leather cigar case, the flexible type \\·hich they sold in Venice. It is related of him that he would proceed in the afternoon, umbrella in hand and brushes in pocket, to some spot he had previously picked. Then he would sit down, preferably at a table with a gJass of absinthe. The composition \Vould be started by the quick drawing of one or t\vo lines, most likely a curved one for the edge of the cafe table, or. if he were before a beach in Brittany, the curve \Vould be for the shoreline. There followed little t\visted dabs of paint for figures on the boulevards, or for sails upon the sea. As he worked he would talk of tones and tone relations. Then he would drink another absinthe: take one more glance at his work: make another jab at the panel and suddenly close the

22 • THE BEACH, ST. MALO Collectwn: Art Association of Montreal box with a snap. Again, were he not satisfied he might rub out what he had started, sometimes with a paint rag, sometimes with his pocket handkerchief. Often he \vould stop to complete the sketch by putting in a figure of a woman or of a dog, or, if he were in Canada, it would be a sleigh and a horse. In the \Vinter he sat inside cafes or restBurants, from which he looked out through the windows or concentrated on the people about. From the beach at St. Malo to the native quarters at Tangiers, he went with his palette box and, working wherever a chair was comfortable and a table with whiskey or absinthe handy, he brought back his vision of the world. Tunis, Marseilles, Antwerp, Quebec, Montreal, Santiago in Cuba, Jamaica and Trinidad, so the record grew, and, as the years proceeded, the pale moonstone surfaces became richer, more like rubies at times, were veined again with lines running nervously beneath masses of thin pigment, leaping over the pigment itself, pencil strokes increasing in sinuosity and number to add conversation and personality to VISIOn. 2. HIS STUDIO CANVASES The painter \Vho arose early to sit before his easel, in Paris, with his back to the window and the quays of the Seine, with now the cry of the marchand de quatre saisons echoing below, now the voice of a flower-woman calling fresh blooms and open blos­ soms, was an artisan at work on canvas. His task was to make enlargements of those tiny compositions, which he had beside him, hundreds of sketches recording scenes of travel from the Caribbean to the Adriatic. His choice depended on his whim. He might decide to \Vork from one done in Canada the year previously, or he might pick one of meadows and orchards brought back from a visit to Brittany only a month before. Then the problem of translating a composition, conceived on a scale of fractions of 24 • VIE\V FRO"t\11 WI DO\V, TA~GIERS Collection: R. B . !vforrice, Montreal inches, to one that had to be measured in tens of inches, began. Sometimes he \\·ould be busy upon two or three canvases \Vhich had been commissioned by some individual buyer, but more often he would be working in anticipation of the yearly exhibitions of the Salon d'Automne, of the Societe N ouvelie in Paris and the International Society in London. At first Morrice used only to have one easel in his studio (he said that \Vas all you wanted) but afterwards he obtained two. One of the fixtures of the studio was his umbrella, which we are told he used often to hang beside his easel \vhile painting. He probably squinted at it when he was at work in order that he might judge certain values of darkness which he had in mind for his composition. The technique by which he worked in his studio had this advantage ; it allowed him to avoid the superficial naturalism of the impressionists. To the artists who persisted in finishing their canvases in the open air, little unity and less construction \\·as possible: the coherence they achieved in their designs was rarely more than superficial: it was a coherence that depended on the momentary effect of the play of light and atmosphere upon objects in nature. The work .lv1orrice did in his studio can, on the other hand, nearly always be followed for a rhythm that comes from the arrangement of the pigments themselves on the canvas. H js later compositions, in fact. eminently have design. That Morrice is a harmoniste after Whistler in much of his early work, especially in those nocturnes of Venice, is obv ious, yet, in so far as painting may be defined as something done v; ith a brush. Morrice was a better painter than Whistler. As he matured, while he retained an interest in the delicacy of \Vhistlerian patterns, he also became equally alive to the expres­ sive brush strokes that \Vere a feature of the art of Manet. Like

Opposite: MARKET PLACE, CONCARNEAU Collec tio n : T heArt CalleryofToronto 26 • that great French master, in any conflict between representation and the free handling of paint, it was the fact and not the medium that he sacrificed. Between the early period when he was imitating Whistler and the later period after 1905, when he was painting thinly and freely, there was an interlude during which his work was marked by a passion for texture, for the feeling of la matiere, the surface quality of the pigment. Red and other backgrounds began to be covered, heavily here, slightly there, with blues and creams, olive greens and violets, so that through the overpainting you might see patches of the underpainting. Layers of pigment were built up with purpose to give variety to the surface, until the painting began to assume the surface patina of an ancient oriental bowl. By 1905 his aesthetic principles were beginning to reach defini­ tion. He told his friend Gerald Kelly about that time that there was no necessity to realize everything in a landscape: only the essentials were of importance. You should move, he would add, in a picture, from warm colours to cold colours, from neatness to disorder. Despite these modifications of style, certain characteristics, not so much of technique as of personality, remained always in his work. In the dream qualities of his vision he was not French but Anglo-Saxon. Again he had certain cliches which never changed. The way in which he drew a horse was an unmistakable signature to his canvases. It was always the same horse, a little too plump, too rounded in the haunches and legs to be like any horse one had ever seen. There was something essentially child-like in his vision, a naivety, you may call it, which allied him closely in his painting to Maurice Prendergast, the American artist and his friend of student days. Arabs, heavily cowled, seated before a view of the environs of Tangiers, become trans-

28 • LANDSCAPE, TRINIDAD Collec tion : The Art Gallery of T oronto formed into Breton fishermen huddled in the corner of a boat in the harbour at Concarneau. Superficially the figures are different: essentially their forms remain the same. A few trees, their trunks dividing the picture into three, with the bank of a river behind, \vas a formula to be found in many of his paintings. Beneath the trees, figures-now of flower women, now of Breton peasants, now of priests or of gentlemen in top-hats-were · 29 spaced according to the exigencies of the design and the demands of the location, now one there, now two here. After 1905 he was no longer painting heavily; he was rather beginning to cover his canvases as lightly as possible. Dappled strokes were placed separately by him on the canvas and then rubbed together with a cloth. Indirectly this was , but in a highly personal form. In the last chapter of his volume, Landmarks in 1'./ineteenth Century Painting, Clive Bell mentions a second crop of impressionists: ··But this second crop consisted of contemporaries who followed tardily the lead of the founders or of men only by a little their juniors-pupils rather than descendants. Lebourg, Le Sidanier, ). W. Morrice, Conder, Sickert and Steer may be considered as of this second brood: you note the prevalence of English names.,' Louis Vauxcelles, the French critic, was willing to link Bonnard, Vuillard, Sickert and Morrice as men who developed a similar style under similar influences. So also did H. S. Ciolkowski place Morrice beside Bonnard, when he wrote in l'Art et les Artistes (December, 1925) : .. He was able with astonishing felicity to play a touch of rose against a cerulean sky, an orange sail against a sea of jade. His art was perfect in measure and economy. Many artists sin either through excess or through an insufficiency of work. Morrice was able, \vith a deliberate tactfulness, to stop when everything had been said. His broad but concise technique, his oily and rich pigments did not resemble those of anyone else; he belonged, however, to his time and place, among those painters who suc­ ceeded Whistler and the impressionists, beside Bonnard and Lebasque and Emile Andre, who was precisely of his generation.,, For the mature .Lv1orrice, the artist who, about 1907, painted the RACE CouRSE AT ST. MALO, now owned by the Montreal Art Association, this description fits without a word to be changed. 30.

In this picture he becomes the Anglo-Saxon counterpart of Bonnard. Anglo-Saxon, one writes, for there is a sense of humour, a secondary association of whimsy in many of his compositions that is not French. Yet it is supremely difficult to classify the man, for no sooner have we him neatly labelled, than we find that he was still at the age of forty-three content and eager to be a student, unprepared to stand still and now at this moment in his life to be deeply influenced by Henri Matisse. This French painter had thrown over-among other things-"the mechanism of perspective in order to give free rein to the decorative combination of coloured planes.·· The older generation of painters, who had understood the impressionists and even the post-impressionists, were startled and bewildered. But not so Morrice. He told Clive Bell, in 1908, as the two men stood before a group of these pictures, that, contrary to popular opinion, Matisse did not need to be put into a padded cell, but that he was good, very good. After the War, about 1919, the Canadian advanced towards a new freedom. He found that which he could absorb from Matisse: the rest he cast aside or forgot. The tropical richness of the vegetation, the flamboyant colouring of sky and landscape in Trinidad, to which, in 1920-21, he made what was the last of his several voyages to the West Indies, provided him with the inspira­ tion he needed. A new synthesis was before him. In his last canvases there emerges, as if it were spontaneously, a calligraphic design of broad strokes of pure colour.

32 • STREET SCENE, PARIS (Watercolour) Collection: The National Gallery of Canada 3. HIS ORA WINGS

~1orrice was above all a painter. not a draughtsman. Never. even in his most accomplished drawings, do we find evidence of that incisive line which we associate with men like Picasso \Vho can sum up a character or a scene in a few masterly strokes of pen or pencil. We do, however, find in the drawings, which he did toward the end of his life, a personal style which is both successful and satisfying. It is a painter's style of drawing which has been developed from the twist and turning of the movements of his brush as it traced a line. It is a form of loose handwriting. His sketch-books, many of which have been preserved, are like his oil panels a story of life as he saw it from across the cafe tables of the world, from Paris to Venice, from Algiers to Havana. Yet what humour is contained throughout, \vhat an ability to take us into the childish world of make-believe! In the south some\vhere he found three little girls, walking along the street, dressed in Sunday best, in black bonnets and dark red frocks­ whom he drew several times with colour notes jotted down beside. The smallest child walks in the centre, her sisters take her by the hand. They look so dignified, so self-conscious in their good behaviour, so much like old women in the disguise of infants, that one cannot help smiling before each drawing. To discover the gestures, the features that go to make individual character, the psychology which the portrait painter seeks, was not one of the talents of Morrice. He could, however. as he did here, capture the mood and the humour of situations. Children, horses, women, he was always putting these down with his pencil, more rarely men, except in Brittany where he filled his pages with the carefully drawn figures of fisherfolk. In drawing he used at first to aim, through shading, for contrasts of black and white, but afterward he began, in the 34 . LANDSCAPE, NORTH AFRICA Collect ion: David Morrice, Montreal (Oil Sketch on Wooden Panel) North African sketches, to place his emphasis more on the line itself. In his West Indian drawings the freedom of line is intense, it is a sweeping stroke, and to this there has been added an almost fiercely-blackened shading in broad lines of shadow and foliage: it is as if he were now trying to paint with his pencil. There are some fine things here, in these, his rough notes on the tropics. Most of his drawings were done, not in the ordinary sketch­ books sold to artists, but in sturdily-bound note-books, which fitted readily into his pocket. If Morrice wrote few letters, of which not many have been preserved, we can, nevertheless, find traces of his personal senti­ ments in these books, for he was sometimes in the habit of using them as memorandum sheets. From time to time quotations appear. Blake's comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds, "This man \Vas hired to depress art," is followed by a sentence from Zangwill, "Art is a spiritual stimulant administered through sensual forms." Included are snatches of songs, of anecdotes (he delighted in good stories and he used to collect them), and of titles of books he meant to read. We find recorded, in one place, Three Soldiers, by Dos Passos, Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, and Marie Chapdelaine, by Louis Hernon. On a certain page is "Roll along, Jordan, Roll," the refrain of the negro spiritual, and then beside it, in French, the quotation, "Un paysage est un etat d'ame ... There are also countless references to concerts, to addresses of shops that sold music for the flute, then the statement by Satie that "Ravel refuses the Legion of Honour, but all his music accepts 1t. Near the end of his life he copied down, carelessly, beside a drawing he was doing, the famous epitaph that John Gay wrote for his own tomb :

Life is a jest and all things show it. I thought so once, but now I know it. 36 . BIBLIOGRAPHY MARIUS AND ARY LEBLOND, Peintres des Races. G. Van Oest &. Cie., Brussels, Belgium, 1909. D. W. BucHANAN, James Wilson Morrice, a Biography. The Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1936. joHN LYMAN, Morrice, Les Editions de l'Arbre, Montreal, 1945. CATALOGUES Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the late J. W. MoRRICE, R.C.A., Art Association of Montreal, 1925. Tableaux et Etudes par ) . W. MoRRICE, Galeries Simonson, Paris, 1926. )AMES WILSON MoRRICE, Exhibition of Paintings, The Art Gallery of W. Scott and Sons, Montreal, 1932. )AMES WILSON MoRRICE, Memorial Exhibition, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 193 7. COLLECTIO S The works of). W. MoRRICE are to be found in numerous private collections in many countries and also in the following public collections:- NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA, OTTAWA. ART AssociATION OF MoNTREAL. ART GALLERY OF ToRo TO. MusEUM OF THE PROVINCE OF QuEBEc, QuEBEC. vANCOUVER ART GALLERy. CANADIAN WAR MEMORIALS CoLLECTION, OTTAWA. PE NSYLVANIA MusEUM OF FINE ARTS, PHILADELPHIA. MusEUM OF MoDER WESTERN ART, Moscow. Mus-EE DE) EU DE PAUME, PARIS, FRA CE. Mus-EE DE BEAux-ARTS, LYoNs, FRANCE. THE NATIONAL GALLERY (MILLBANK), LONDON, ENGLAND. The largest and most representative group of canvases and sketches in any one collection can be seen at the Art Association of Montreal, which through purchase and bequest has in recent years acquired a comprehensive selection of his work. e 37 CoPYRIGHT, CANADA , 1947, BY THE RYERSO · PRESS , ToRONTo.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by mimeograph or any other means (except by reviewers for the public press) without permission ·in writing from the publishers.

Published January, 1947

THE SERIES

CoRNELius KRIEGHOFF - Albert H. Robson

ToM THOMSON Albert H . Robson

). E. H. MAcDoNALD Albert H. Robson

CLARENCE A. GAGNON - Albert H. Robson

PAUL KANE Albert H. Robson

A. Y. jACKSON Albert H. Robson

HENRI jULIEN - Mar ius Barbeau

.!' CoT£, THE WooD CARVER - Marius Barbeau Jl

,) pAINTERS OF QLJEBEC - Marius Barbeau

THOREAU MAcDoNALD - - E. R. Hunter

THE GROUP OF SEVEN - Thoreau MacDonald

C. W. )EFFERYS - - William Colgate

WALTER J. PHILLIPS- Duncan Campbell Scott

)AMES WILSON MoRRICE Donald W. Buchanan

Printed and Bound in Canada. 38 .

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