Lot 39
CORNELIUS KRIEGHOFF
Provenance:
Private Collection, Pennsylvania.
Literature:
J. Russell Harper, Krieghoff, Toronto, 1979, pages 88, 191 (no.52) and 91, no.85, illustrated, for a similar subject entitled Coming from Market, 1860.
Dennis Reid, Krieghoff/Images of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1999, page 180, no.98, colour plate, for an almost identical subject entitled “Going to Market”, c.1860 (The Thomson Collection).
Note:
Although Krieghoff was not particularly interested in fashionable portraiture, he did paint in Quebec a number of studies of habitant heads. While innumerable studies exist of the heads of habitant men, there are none of women, the exception being the “commanding matron” who, as Harper points out, received special treatment in four canvasses painted between 1860 and 1862. Harper describes this subject: “Against a mountainous background she walks primly down a snowy road, a basket on her arm...For a trip to the village she is dressed in her finest clothes, ‘to see and be seen.’ She is a woman with character. Perhaps Krieghoff’s mother-in-law was such a matriarch.”