Provenance:

Continental Galleries of Fine Art, Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal

Literature:

William Watson, Maurice Cullen, R.C.A., Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1930, page 22.
William R. Watson, Retrospective: Recollections of a Montreal Art Dealer, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1974, pages 30-39 (chapter entitled Maurice Cullen).
Sylvia Antoniou, Maurice Cullen, Queen’s University, Kingston, 1982, page 42 and page 78, fig.63 for a similar work entitled Clear Winter’s Day in the Laurentians, 1923.

Note:

Cullen and the Montreal art dealer, William Watson developed a special relationship combining friendship and business. Watson held his first Cullen exhibition in 1923. From that time on, the exhibition became an annual event until the artist’s death in 1934.

In the spring of 1923 the Montreal Gazette (”Montreal Artists Well Represented”) reported: ”Maurice Cullen shows one important canvas A March Evening a typical Laurentian scene with rounded hill, trees and fast moving water swirling past icy shores.”, a fitting description for this lot.

Watson (1930) writes that from 1923 Cullen concentrated on Laurentian landscapes. Watson vividly describes Cullen’s work: “In deep winter under a canopy of snow, when the woods are a silhouette of black against a shimmer of radiant light, Cullen paints his poem to the glory of the Laurentian winter. In his pictures one feels the very mood of hushed solitude, the exquisite silence of the snow-enshrouded world. It is indeed the very soul of this country that he paints.”

Again, Watson (1974) provides a personal insight into the art of his friend: “Cullen loved the joyous flashes of sunlight, the glow of snow, the gleam of ice, the tumult of the freed river in the springtime, and he set down his impressions with an infectious gusto. He taught us to see beauty where we had only thought of cold.”