Lot 82
MAURICE GALBRAITH CULLEN, R.C.A.
Provenance:
Watson Art Galleries, Montreal.
Literature:
William R. Watson, “Retrospective: Recollections of a Montreal Art Dealer”, Toronto, 1974, chapter 4 (Maurice Cullen), pages 30-39.
Sylvia Antoniou, “Maurice Cullen”, Kingston, 1982.
Exhibited:
11th Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Pastels by Maurice Cullen, RCA, Watson Art Galleries, Montreal, 14-24 January, 1933 (as “The Cache River in Early March”).
Note:
Cullen and William Watson, the art dealer, developed a rather special relationship combining friendship and business. Watson’s support and promotion of the artist’s Laurentian landscapes played an important role in Cullen’s career. Cullen often confessed his pleasure in the flexibility of pastels and, as Watson writes, he explored the wide subtleties of tone attainable only in this medium.
It is probably in his depictions of the Laurentians that Cullen achieved his greatest success. Watson points out that the artist made a long and special study of ice formation and ice colour: “There is the steel-blue of mid-winter ice…Cullen loved the joyous flashes of sunlight, the glow of snow, the gleam of ice, the tumult of the freed river in the springtime…He taught us to see beauty where we had only thought of cold.”