L.L. FitzGerald
Manitoba Landscape
oil on board
signed and dated 1929 lower right; titled and dated to the estate label on the reverse
10 x 12 in ( 25.4 x 30.5 cm )
The year 1929 was an eventful one for Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald both professionally and personally. His flourishing art career was recognized by the National Gallery of Canada when they purchased his Williamson’s Garage from their Annual Exhibition of Canadian Art. His teaching excellence was rewarded when he was promoted to the principalship of the Winnipeg School of Art. And on a personal level, meeting Bertram Brooker, Toronto artist, writer, and former Winnipegger, was consequential. That summer the two painters talked voluminously and sketched together. Their ensuing friendship lasted for the rest of their lives, and Brooker became a major advocate for FitzGerald’s art.
From 1928 to 1930 Brooker commanded a large readership who avidly followed his weekly column “The Seven Arts” syndicated in five Southam newspapers across Canada. He first championed FitzGerald’s work in the 7 September 1929 issue of the Ottawa Evening Citizen: “It is not easy to capture the mood of the West. The landscape, of course, becomes a horizontal strip across the canvas, and the rest is sky; and cloud formations do not vary a great deal anywhere. The Western artists whose work I have seen do not appear to concern themselves greatly with the task of portraying the essential moods of their country. LeMoine FitzGerald is constantly searching for the structure, spatial relationships and colour subtleties of the subjects he approaches.”
While the small Manitoba Landscape, 1929 conforms to the formulaic low horizon and big sky characteristic of many prairie pictures, here FitzGerald transcends this compositional cliché to paint a compelling vision of the majesty of a prairie sky. Unlike his more characteristic large, smoothly finished landscape canvases from the period, FitzGerald’s Manitoba Landscape, executed in oil on wood, is smaller and more textured. The panel’s surface, built from layered brushstrokes of opaque paint, imparts an immediacy consistent with a sketch made rapidly outdoors. The shapes of the clouds and the strong foreground horizontal band have an abstract quality. These elements combine to make Manitoba Landscape one of the most dynamic, dramatic, and powerful small paintings found in FitzGerald’s entire oeuvre.
Michael Parke-Taylor is a Canadian art historian, curator, and author of "Bertram Brooker: When We Awake!" (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2024) and editor of "Some Magnetic Force: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Writings" (Concordia University Press, 2023).
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he received his education. At the age of 14, he went to work in a wholesale drug office. He also worked in an engraver’s plant and in a stockbroker’s office until he was 22. All this time, he had also attended art classes, nights, at A.S. Kesztheli’s Art School in Wpg. (1909-12). About 1912, he went into the field of art full time. He married Vally Wright and they had two children, Edward and Patricia. Working in many branches of art to support his family, he did everything from decorating windows to painting scenery. During this time, he was developing successfully in his easel painting and exhibited with the RCA between 1912 and 1925. His work was then strongly influenced by French Impressionists but was Canadian in subject matter. He held his first solo shows in 1921 at the WAG. Earlier that year, he had completed studies at the ASL/NY under Boardman Robinson and Kenneth Hayes Miller. In 1924, he joined the staff of the Winnipeg School of Art and four years later became its principal. Of this period, William Colgate in “Canadian Art” (1943) noted, “…he returned to Winnipeg to teach in its art school. In spite of his necessary preoccupation with teaching, he was steadily pursued his bent as a landscape painter and has occasionally been represented in more important exhibitions of Winnipeg, Toronto and elsewhere…”
Writing about his work, Donald Buchanan noted, “…Fitzgerald…worked too slowly and painstakingly ever to be affected by such vagaries of fashion…painted little, and that little with precise care. Most of his year was given over to his duties as principal of the Winnipeg School of Art. The relatively few water-colours and oils he did of the prairie or of the thin tracery of trees along the edges of Manitoba streams were, however, always much admired, as were also his more numerous drawings….”
Fitzgerald had been appointed Principal of the WSA in August of 1929. In the summer of 1929, he also met Bertram Brooker, artist, broadcaster and playwright, visiting his native Winnipeg on a business trip. The two artists then kept in contact with one another by letter. Fitzgerald had a profound influence on Brooker’s direction in art. Brooker turned from total abstraction to realism. Fitzgerald himself had moved to a greater stylization of his work. In 1929, F.B. Housser wrote, “His work is rarely seen in eastern galleries. A few years ago, his canvases were among the most popular exhibited in Winnipeg but a change of direction along more modern lines carried him ahead of the public and consequently into greater obscurity…. He works in oils and black-and-white and has also done mural painting, having executed a decorative scheme for a room in the St. Charles Hotel, Winnipeg.”
This change was to lead him into the ranks of the Group of Seven, the last member, in 1932, replacing J.E.H MacDonald, who had died earlier that year. Fitzgerald’s work took on more design, his trees became less detailed while at the same time his development of scenes from his house or his backyard began to appear; these were more meticulous, although never cluttered in detail. In 1933, he became a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters, which grew out of the Group of Seven, when it disbanded the same year. By the late 1940’s and 1950’s, he had returned to the cycle of the Impressionists, particularly reminiscent of one of its later members, Georges Seurat, although there is no evidence to suggest that he actually studied Seurat’s work. It was said of him, “A painter of the prairies, he was nevertheless a quiet man, the antithesis of the robustness sometimes associated with the West….” He made impressive graphics which included wood engravings, drypoints, and was especially successful with his linocuts. His drawings were always superb.
He did abstract and semi-abstract work in the 1950’s and had done a few in the late 1930’s. Some of his pen and ink drawings were done by making tiny flecks or short strokes to form an outline of his subjects. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa has one of the finest collections of his work due to prudent purchases by its curators, singular bequest of the Douglas M. Duncan Collection, made through Duncan’s sister J.P. Barwick.
He was awarded an Honorary L.L.D., at the University of Manitoba (1952). In 1956, at the age of 66, he died of a heart attack. His ashes were scattered over the area of Snowflake, Manitoba, where he spent his youth during his summer holidays on his grandmother’s farm. In April of 1958, four galleries collaborated in a memorial exhibition at the NGC. The exhibition then went on tour. In May of 1963, an exhibition of 128 of his works titled, “A New Fitzgerald”, was shown at the WAG. The show included portraits, animal sketches, landscapes and a number of nudes.
In the Winnipeg suburb of St. James where he lived most of his life, the community named a lane “Fitzgerald’s Walk” in his memory.
Literature Source:
"A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume 1: A-F, 5th Edition, Revised and Expanded", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1997