JAMES WILSON MORRICE w (] ~ ......) ......) >- u w co w a~ ~ ~ w zu ~ ~ ~ LLl 'I JAMES WILSON MORRICE 7? ByDONALD W.BUCHANAN THE RYERSON PRESS TORONTO MOUNTAIN HILL, QUEBEC Collection: Mrs. Howard Pillow, Montreal 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 Canada, 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 Tunis, 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 Paris, he seemed continually to be moved by some inner compulsion, which drove him in progression from Canada to France, 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 paintings 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 painting 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 Tangiers, 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 w 0... 0... w........ 0 :r: u <w co w X f-+ with the years. Following his death, the Autumn Salon in Paris, which for a generation had been fostering much of the best and most vital of contemporary painting in Europe, organized a retrospective exhibition of his works, an honour given to few foreign artists, while in England, at about the same time, the critic, P. G. Konody, \vould write concerning a group of his latest paintings : "With Van Gogh he shares the intensity of the mood realized, with Gauguin the distinguished sense of simplified decorative design. " Morrice was the integral artist. He was the very opposite of the virtuoso, the theorist or the self-proclaiming arriviste. Born to riches, the son of a wealthy Montreal merchant, he received until his father's death, a yearly allowance that was sufficient to meet his needs. In addition, he always sold a few pictures each year to buyers in Paris, New York, Montreal, and even at one period to collecto_rs in centres as far removed as Glasgow and Morocco. This was the economic basis of his independence, the reason why he was able to forge forward so freely, so unimpeded by other considerations than those dictated by his own conscience as an artist. One could spend pages describing this growth of his talent, from the days when he did those first painstaking water colours in Toronto, through his years of training abroad, to his early friendships with the English artist, Richard Sickert and the Australian, Charles Condor, and his later acquaintanceships with Henri Matisse, Paul Marquet and other Europeans.