Rene-Jean Richard (Canadian 1895 to 1982)
Born in Switzerland, Rene Richard moved to Alberta, Canada at the age of ten with his family. The arduous farmer’s life they lived did not appeal to him, and he left home as a young man to hunt and trap in the North. Life among his fellow trappers in the vast Northern landscape inspired him to paint, so in 1926 he began his studies in Edmonton. In Paris from 1927-30 at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and the Academie Colarossi, he met Clarence Gagnon (1881-1942), a prominent figure in Canadian modern art, who encouraged him to take up painting full time. Richard continued to hunt in the north of Alberta and in the Arctic until 1942, when he settled in Baie St.-Paul on the St. Lawrence River, an area in which Gagnon had previously painted. Later, after a 1952 trip to Northern Quebec, Richard settled permanently at a house there, now Maison Rene Richard, a gallery and museum, where members of Canada’s best-known artistic movement, the Group of Seven, also lived and painted from time to time.
In 1967, Canada’s centenary year, Richard was given a one-man show at the Quebec Fine Arts Museum. Richard and Gagnon, in common with their contemporaries in the Group of Seven, were largely concerned with developing a specifically Canadian art, with its own, proper subject matter and painterly idiom. Following the First World War, in which Canadian troops played an unexpectedly prominent part and the country began to take a more active role in international affairs, the search for a national, as opposed to a colonial, culture became more urgent. Canada’s vast and remote landscapes, which at mid-century were beginning to be opened to railways and permanent roads, became the wellspring for a new national school of painting. Rene Richard’s large and impressive canvases capture a sense of the landscape’s expansive space, but also the importance of forest meetings between trappers, who otherwise might go weeks without human contact.
Information courtesy of Neal Auction Company, October 2007