Miller Gore Brittain 1912 - 1968

Estate of the artist

By descent in the family

Private Collection, Toronto

Since he was born in 1912, Brittain experienced both the Great Depression and the Second World War well before he was forty. He had shown early promise as an artist and, fortunately, spent two years (1930-1932) learning and perfecting his craft at the Art Students' League in New York, before the deprivations of the thirties and the horrors of the war shaped his attitudes and his art indelibly. He was somewhat influenced by American painters such as Reginald Marsh and Ralph Soyer, and was of course familiar with many of the Works Progress Administration projects in the United States.

Consequently, and like many artists during the thirties, Brittain used his art as a form of social commentary. He liked to honour and to magnify the middle class: the longshoremen, the workers, the housewives, the shopkeepers, and the children, who made up his community in Saint John, New Brunswick, a city he loved and depicted often in his early work. Although his gentle satirical humour is found in a work like this and in other paintings from this period, Brittain invested his subjects with love and earnest affection. If there is a sense of slight exaggeration or woodenness in his figures, it is because that was what he wanted to portray. Because as a portrait painter, Brittain had few equals, since he could draw a likeness with an accuracy and sensitivity that was astonishing.

Promenade, which was painted before the war, shows all the sharpness of perception and the skill of organization that Brittain could bring to the act of painting. He was able to catch ordinary people going about their lives and their daily tasks in a way that unfolded like a narrative, giving the viewer an insight into the society he was describing. He was often touted as the Canadian Brueghel, so well did he seem to characterize life in his home town. The rock-solid composition of this exceptionally fine painting shows how meticulously he could fit together so many elements and create a coherent image -- from the Chinese restaurant owner in the background to the fur-collared ladies in front all gathered under an imaginative collection of signs and hydro lines.

During the war that ensued, in which he served as a bomber pilot, Brittain, as one writer noted, found himself ...staring into the corridors of hell. From the plastic nose of a lumbering night bomber, he watched his high explosives open up majestic cities like caskets of fiery jewels. In the years after the war Brittain turned to religious art, and then finally, to spectral figures with hollow eyes, much as he himself looked, as another friend, who visited him in hospital just before he died in 1968, wrote of him.

Miller Brittain was something of a maverick in Canadian art. He lived outside the mainstream of landscape painting, which so preoccupied the Group of Seven and many of their colleagues. What he contributed, however, was a keen and valid portrait of humanity, and he did so with a strength and compassion that is both striking and enduring.