James Wilson Morrice 1865 - 1924

Mrs. Ward C. Pitfield
Laing Galleries, Toronto as A Port in Brittany c. 1905
Private Collection, Port Hope

Lovers of drawings know, and often say, that what is so wonderful about them is that it is like watching the artist at work, thinking, exploring, his/her pen or pencil dancing along as one idea shifts a little, collides with another idea, and produces something unexpected and magical. And so, indeed, many drawings do. They are, most often, the most intimate aspect of an artist’s inner thoughts, and they do reveal things that the later paintings, sculptures, or prints do not. Moreover, drawings tend to be preliminary to great works and are so often seen as the disposable scaffolding upon which something more substantial is erected.

In Canada, artists do draw, of course, since drawing is usually the first step in rendering anything. But Canadian artists, steeped in the landscape tradition, have a long tradition of ‘drawing’ or ‘sketching’ out in the open in oil paints on small panels of wood – panels especially cut for size or to fit in their paint boxes, or panels made of a particular kind of wood. Some simply used cigar-box lids or anything else that came to hand.

For Morrice, his mode of making notations when he was walking or looking or exploring or sitting at a café and saw something he wanted to get down, was either to make a small pencil sketch in a small paper sketchbook or to haul out of his pocket a small and thin piece of wood to make a quick sketch in oil. These small panels, ‘pochades’ as they were called in French (and English), were the medium he used often, and this scene of a port (Lot 89) is a perfect example of a scene the artist has seized ‘in the moment’ in which it struck him as worthy of recording.

He has set in the buildings in the background, a patch of water between the two banks of the river, the black hull of a boat with a lateen sail and raked mast, the stern of another with its flag hanging listlessly, and then something a little indistinct on the foreground pavement of the wharf, likely figures of workmen. The turbulent sky has added the atmosphere that Morrice doubtless wanted to capture.

Le Pont d’Austerlitz (Lot 90) is another pochade that has also grasped a brief but stirring vision that Morrice had at this spot. Again, his forte has been the way he has organized the view, looking out past the tree trunk on the left toward a slate-gray sky with a wedge of road in the foreground and a counterbalancing wedge, dark but detailed, of the bridge.