Robert Wakeham Pilot 1898 - 1967

Private Collection, United Kingdom

Pilot was equally adept in painting during any season, but his forté, perhaps because of where he lived, was surely winter – that part of the year that dominates the inhabitants of Montreal and Quebec City. The subtleties of different kinds of snow, the reflection of light on snow, the cast of the skies of winter, and the way rivers, fields, houses, villages and cities looked in winter, seemed to attract him particularly.

This fine canvas manifests Pilot’s ability to find something special in what many of us would pass by without noticing anything at all. He has made a composition that is complete and intriguing by giving us an immediate foreground, two figures, a substantial house with a spire, but one shrouded in trees and shrubbery, a prominent hill and a very distant city spire on the far horizon. The two interlocking triangles in the lower half of the painting, one dark, one light, with the hill and sky behind them, make a strong composition.

Although the colours are all muted in honesty to the scene itself, Pilot has found a rich variety of nuances in every part of the painting to give it both veracity and vitality.