Marc Aurèle Fortin 1888 - 1970

Lindchrist Gallery, Windsor
Galerie Bernard Desroches, Montréal
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, Montréal
A.K. Prakash & Associates Inc., Toronto
Private Collection

In the 1920s, when he had to suffer abuse by his father about being an artist, and before penury later in his life began to take its toll on him, Fortin painted some of his most powerful, enchanting, and durable pictures. He had found his subjects early in his career, for they were the trees, fields, buildings, and the rivers and lakes in and around his beloved St. Rose, and the urban, suburban, and natural scenery around the metropolis of Montréal.

The Île Ste. Hélène lies in the middle of the St. Lawrence River at the eastern end of the island of Montréal. Before the Jacques Cartier bridge was built and opened in 1930, it was a rural patch of land, treed and pastoral, much as the Île aux Coudres, where Jean-Paul Lemieux lived later on, was in relation to Quebec City. The vista that Fortin has presented to us here is one that shows the island as a park with an inviting path down to the water, and with the core of the city upstream in the distance to the west.

The artist invites us to see the river and the city through, and under, a foreground of magnificent green and gold trees, which are set against a dramatic sunset. The flaming sky and the almost surreal clouds enrich the whole composition, but the central tree, just off centre to the left, is in many ways the subject of the painting. While Tom Thomson’s Jack Pine and The West Wind, and the other great portraits of trees by Harris, Varley, Lismer, and Jackson, are powerful and iconic, Fortin’s intimate treatment of this tree, with its carefully detailed setting, is in their company, and with equal assurance, comparable power, and easy grace.