The art of James W. Morrice, the Montreal-born painter who spent many years in Paris, was described by the heroine of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician as the most delightful interpreter of Paris I know, and when you have seen his sketches, and he has done hundreds, of unimaginable grace and feeling and distinction - you can never see Paris in the same way again.

Maugham’s heroine was not alone in her praise of this artist, who, by the turn of the century, was Canada’s most renowned international artist. Only a few years after he had made Paris his home, critics and artists were praising his work and inviting him to exhibit at various galleries in the city. Famed Canadian painter A.Y. Jackson recalled that Morrice, in his student days, had "opened our eyes to things no one ever thought of painting and added that his subtle colour harmonies and his seemingly careless technique appeared very radical to Canadians.

The son of a prominent Montreal merchant family of Scottish descent, Morrice showed an early talent for painting but complied with his father’s wish by graduating from the University of Toronto Law School in 1889 before pursuing an art career. His father’s friend, Sir William Van Horne, the first to buy one of his paintings, suggested James be sent to Europe for further art study.

After a brief stay in London in 1890, James went to Paris, enrolled at the Académie Julian, then worked with individual teachers including Henri Harpignies and America’s James McNeill Whistler who became a friend and had a marked influence on his work.

Morrice opened a studio in Montmartre and became one of the crowd of expatriate and native-born painters to frequent the cafés on the Left Bank. There, while painting street scenes, barges on the Seine, the local circus, and the numerous cafés and garden parks of Paris, he met writers and fellow artists. Many of his original sketches and oils were made on small panels of blond wood.

After only a few years in Paris, Morrice became an established artist. His work was exhibited at several salons including the Salon d’Automne, which he described as somewhat revolutionary at times but with the most original work. Critics were using words like exquisite to describe his work, often sold to prominent Parisians. In 1904, the French Government bought his "Le Quai des Grands Augustins for its collection of Modern Foreign Art at the Jeu de Paume Galerie while the city of Lyons purchased one of his Canadian paintings. Museums in the USA, Russia, Luxembourg, even the Louvre, acquired other works. Only a few were bought in Canada - three of them by his father’s Mount Royal Club in Montreal.

Although Morrice never again lived in Canada, he made annual winter visits to see family and friends in Montreal and, while there, painted the Quebec countryside. On one trip to Quebec’s north shore he met and became friends with Newfoundland-born Maurice Cullen, a painter he considered the man in Canada who gets at the guts of things. Later they worked together in Venice where Morrice gained further insight into the use of light on canvas.
 

Sainte-Anne de Beaupré, P.Q., circa 1905, interprets the essence of a cold winter day in Quebec. The bleak, grey scene, dominated by cold snow and a colder sky, brilliantly contrasts with other Morrice canvases depicting lively summer café scenes in Paris or Venice, the shimmering beaches of St. Malo, and the sultry coast of Brittany. [Photo, courtesy Collection of Power Corporation of Canada]

Morrice made friends easily, among them artists such as Whistler, Matisse, Pendergast, and Lautrec and writers like Maughamand Arnold Bennett, the latter also thinly disguising Morrice in one of his novels. Bennett also wrote in his autobiography, I found him a most distinguished person, full of right and beautiful ideas about everything. As young Eric Bell, later a noted British art critic, recalled, Morrice found beauty everywhere, in streets, in cafés, in bars, in shop windows, circuses and penny steamers.

Even though able to afford a good life through both his family wealth and the sale of his work, Morrice lived simply. Kathleen Dally Pepper in her 1966 biography of Morrice wrote: He practiced economy in all things - the detail of his work, in his spending and in the comforts of living. He liked to part neither with his money, nor his sketches.

In Bennett’s autobiography, Evening with Exiles, Morrice’s bedroom was described as a monk’s cell, and his studio as having two easels, one for unfinished pictures and the other for finished or near-finished paintings. On the wall were other paintings: one was of his young mistress (he never married) entitled Lea in a Tall Hat and others were colourful water colours by the American artist Maurice Pendergast that he had received in exchange for some of his own work.
 

Connoisseur art dealer for over 50 years the late G. Blair Laing called James Wilson Morrice one of the 20th century’s most talented and lyrical painters. In the intensely creative atmosphere of France at the turn of the century Morrice ambitiously embraced the advanced art of his day. Influenced by peers such as Matisse, Marquet and Cézanne, the expatriote from Montreal is perhaps best known as a colourist. His composition virtuosity   of integrating warm and cool colours, for many, was unexcelled in his day. [Photo, courtesy The Art Gallery of Ontario]

By 1914 his parents had died and, with the war in Europe disrupting the Paris he knew and loved, Morrice moved to London where, through the urging of art critic Roger Fry, the Tate Gallery bought his painting, A House in Santiago.

Late in 1917 he returned to Paris and was asked by Lord Beaverbrook to become a war artist. During this assignment, whichlasted only a few months, he made sketches and canvases portraying the aftermath of the great war. One seven-by-nine-footmural of an endless line of troops marching through a muddy battlefield is now a part of the Canadian War MemorialsCollection in Ottawa.

Always restless, Morrice made return trips to Morocco and Algiers to which he had travelled with Matisse in prewar times. Healso revisited and painted in the West Indies, but his health was fast deteriorating largely from excessive alcohol consumption and in 1922 he painted one of his last major works, The Port of Algiers. After that, finding he could no longer paint, hebecame frustrated and irritable. Ill for much of 1923, he spent that Christmas at Cagnes with Lea Cadoret, his mistress of many years.
 

A genius in capturing the effect of sunlight on landscape, Morrice demonstates his mastery of colour in Palazzo Dario, Venice (Venice at Sunset), oil on canvas, circa 1904. [Photo, courtesy Collection of Power Corporation of Canada]

Then, as Matisse later recalled, Morrice, a little like a migrating bird but without any fixed landing place, went to Sicily andTunis, dying there in a French military hospital on January 23, 1924. He was buried nearby with only the doctor, the clergyman,and the British consul in attendance.

Post humously, before Canadians became aware that he was a significant painter of international stature, French galleries continued to recognize him as an outstanding artist. In 1926, the Paris Galeries Simonson held a comprehensive showing of his work. At home, the Art Association of Montreal was the first to honour him but, in 1927 and 1937, the National Gallery ofCanada organized major exhibitions of his work. Canadians had at last acknowledged his greatness. Today, writes Pepper, Morrice’s paintings hold their distinguished place in any modern gallery.

Mel James