Horatio Walker

In 1880, he settled in the village of L'Épiphanie where he began his pictorial sketches and cultivated a life of simplicity. Walker is used to taking long walks between Portneuf and Charlevoix. He forged ties with French Canadians, acting for them as a beacon to the outside world. He travels to Rome and meets Pope Leo XIII to receive a blessing from his rosaries. He won his first prize in New York in 18811 and was admitted to the American Watercoulour Society in 1882 for Le Porcher des Porcs.

In 1883, he realized his dream by settling in Quebec, opening a workshop at the Hotel Clarendon. He was admitted into the Society of American Artists in 1887 and into the National Academy of Design in 1891. Walker approaches several artistic techniques: watercolor, ink, charcoal, oil and seeks to paint the canvas of the country. He teamed up with the New York dealer Newman Montross2, who managed to increase demand for his works. In 1899, the National Gallery of Canada bought his Ox at the Watering Place for ten thousand dollars, which allowed him to live comfortably.

His painting idealizes rural life in Quebec in a pastoral art, expressing the dignity of the inhabitant. During an exhibition in London in 1901, the Art Journal compared him to Jean-François Millet because of his attachment to the values ??of the Barbizon school. He received praise from critics Sadakichi Hartmann and Gilbert Parker in 1902. During the 1900s he was Canada's most famous painter. He lives in London but he returns to Île d'Orléans every summer to paint.

Walker became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and of the Canadian Art Club, of which he became president in 1915. He was also received into the American Watercolor Society. Walker befriends the painter Clarence Gagnon. Although he did not have much sympathy for Impressionism, Futurism and Cubism, he welcomed modern artists such as Maurice Denis, George Desvallières, Henri Charlier and Paul Bellot into his studio.

Walker develops a liking for Paul Cézanne and he meets Henri Matisse and Augustus John in Pittsburgh. He values ??the works of Cornelius Krieghoff, who painted in the same style as him a century earlier. He studies the works of young Canadian artists who do not know him in person, such as Octave Bélanger, Georges Duquette, Ozias Leduc, Guido Nincheri, Robert Pilot and Gordon Pfeiffer.

Very devoted to artistic education in Canada, he temporarily agreed to direct the École des beaux-arts de Québec at the request of Athanase David and Charles-Joseph Simard and sought to keep his paintings in the province of Quebec. As early as 1930, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec acquired works by the artist3.

The First World War meant a decrease in activity for him and the other artists of his generation. Having retired permanently to Île d'Orléans in the 1920s, he worked in his small studio until the end of his life.

In 1934, he declared that for him, art is to paint what he sees, while rejecting the influence of religions on his paintings. He died in Sainte-Pétronille in Quebec in 1938 and is buried in the Anglican chapel of the village. - source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Walker#Quotes