Provenance

Mr. Charles Matthews, owner of Sampson-Matthews, Toronto

Ingram Gallery, Toronto

Masters Gallery, Calgary

Private collection

The village of Cacouna was old, settled country near the St. Lawrence River, with farms running back from the highway, long and narrow and all the houses close together. Cacouna was a very picturesque place, piled up with snow, with a fine old parish church in the middle of town. Jackson’s 1921 sketching trip was his first visit to the area, and he took a lively interest in the late winter life around the little Lower St. Lawrence community. Throughout Jackson’s long career he often recounted how this fifty-mile stretch between Cacouna and Bic was his favourite place to work. He was never happier than when he was sketching on the south bank of the St. Lawrence.

Some of AY’s most distinguished paintings come from this region of Quebec, including “Winter Road, Quebec”, 1921 (C. S. Band Collection), “A Quebec Village”, 1921 (National Gallery of Canada), “A Village on the Gulf”, I921 (F. T. Jenkins Collection), all from the Cacouna area. These paintings are well known to Canadians having been used as dust jackets for two books illustrated by Jackson: his autobiography titled, A Painter’s Country, which uses “Road to St. Simon” (1940), and Henry Beston’s book The St. Lawrence, which uses a version of the National Gallery’s “Quebec Village”. 

This excerpt references various sources including Naomi Jackson Groves’ A.Y.’s Canada, Drawings by A.Y. Jackson (Clarke, Irwin & Co. Toronto, 1968).