Antoine Sébastien Plamondon (1804-1895)

oday Antoine Plamondon is perhaps most well-known as a portraitist in the neo-classical style. It is estimated that he painted over fifty portraits of the upper bourgeosie of Quebec City which included bishops, clerics, parish priests, seigneurs, politicians, doctors, notaries, merchants, businessmen and their families. However, during his long and productive career, he was also one of Quebec's most prolific painters of religious works. Of his numerous different portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, still lifes, and religious paintings, the last grouping accounts for more than half of Plamondon's oeuvre.

Plamondon was born in 1804 at Ancienne-Lorette, Quebec, the son of a grocer. He began to study painting at the age of fifteen when he was apprenticed to the religious painter Joseph Légaré (1795-1855). Plamondon assisted Légaré in restoring a sizable collection of old European paintings which had been gathered by Abbé Louis-Joseph Desjardins and his associates in France and sent to Quebec to be kept safe from destruction during the French revolution. Much of Plamondon's learning period was spent on the restoration of these works. By the time he was twenty-one, he had become a trained artist with a particular aptitude for portrait painting. In 1825, Plamondon opened his own studio on the Côte du Palais in Montreal and began undertaking commissions for the churches at Beaumont (1826), Bécancour (1825) and Cap Santé (1825). The following year he met Descheneaux, the Vicar-General of Quebec, who recognized his talent and secured funds for him to study in Paris in July 1826. This made Plamondon the first Canadian since the eighteenth century to study art in France. In Paris, he became the pupil of Paulin Guérin (1783-1855), portrait painter to Charles X and follower of neo-classic painter Jacques-Louis David (1825), from whom he learned his classical approach to painting. However, his study in France came to an end when, during the Louis-Philippe uprisings, Charles X, who Plamondon had supported against the anti-aristocratic followers of Louis-Philippe, abdicated in 1830. Disappointed, Plamondon left Paris, made some short visits to Venice, Florence, and Rome where he copied works of early Italian painters, and returned to Quebec in the same year. Upon his return, he set up his studio first in a rue Sainte-Famille location and then in a house owned by the Hôtel-Dieu and began at once to receive commissions for portraits and religious works for churches. By the mid-thirties Plamondon had made a place for himself in Quebec.

The years between 1830s to the mid-1840s were the most productive years of Plamondon's career and those in which his best work was done. During this time, Plamondon had two pupils: Francis Matte (1809-1839) and Théophile Hamel (1817-1870), the latter who became a reputable painter in his own right. Portraits of the early thirties include: Cyprien Tanguay (1832), Amable Dionne and his wife (1834), Mathilde Perrault (1834), Abbé David-Henri Têtu (1835), and Monseigneur Joseph Signay, Archbishop of Quebec (1836). Plamondon excelled in portraiture with live models because of his skill at capturing the sitter's expression realistically. He also took particular care to reproduce their clothing meticulously, especially in his studies of women. This attention to detail makes his works invaluable today not only as examples of 19th century painting in Quebec but also as precise visual documentation of historical dress at the time. In 1838, he received a medal from the Société Littéraire et Historique de Québec for his portrait entitled Le dernier indien (The Last Indian), the subject of which was Zacharie Vincent, the last pureblooded native of Lorette. The portrait was subsequently purchased by Lord Durham as a tribute to Canadian artistic achievement. In 1841, Plamondon painted what is considered to be his masterpieces: a series of three young nuns of the Hôpital Géneral, daughters of prominent merchant families in Quebec. Soeur Saint-Alphonse (1841) is from this series. During this period, he also painted portraits of Madame Joseph Laurin (1839), members of the Tourangeau Family (1842), Elzéar Bédard and his wife (1842), and Madame Francis-N. Gingras (1854). While his earlier paintings were based on the classical tradition, his later works moved to a freer style at times as in The Flute Player (1866) of which he painted three versions. In 1871, he advertised that he would paint portraits from photographs.

Throughout the remainder of his career, as in his earlier period, Plamondon was constantly painting religious pictures for parish churches in the city and at Cap-Santé, Saint-Pierre (Ile d'Orléans), Ile-Bizard, l'Islet, and many other villages in the surrounding counties. The care and depth of perception that mark Plamondon's portraits, however, were absent from his religious paintings as these could not be studied from life. In order to fill his many commissions from churches, Plamondon drew upon and freely adapted paintings from the Desjardins collection as well as engravings by Reubens, Raphael, and other old European Masters. This approach can be seen in the prestigious commission Plamondon received in 1836 to paint a series depicting the Way of the Cross for the Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal. The result was fourteen very large Stations of the Cross, each measuring approximately eight by five feet, which he exhibited in Quebec upon completion. Painted between 1837 and 1839, this is the first known Way of the Cross series by a Quebec artist. However, when acceptance time came, the paintings were rejected by the clergy of Notre-Dame because of the departure from liturgical orthodoxy in their choice of scenes depicted. Consequently, after the exhibition, they were stored in Plamondon's studio at the Hôtel-Dieu until, some years later, the church official who had commissioned them finally accepted them and they were hung in the Seminary of Notre-Dame. Years later they were discovered in the attic of St. Patrick's Church, Montreal, and were then kept by l'Institute des Sourds-Muets, Montreal, until 1961. Six of them are known to have survived and were acquired for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

In the 1850s, Plamondon retired to Neuville, Quebec, where he enjoyed the life of a gentleman farmer. However, he continued to paint until 1885. Between the years 1881 and 1882, he decorated the Church at Neuville, his own parish church, with eighteen paintings. In 1880, he was the charter member and founding vice-president of the Royal Canadian Academy when both the Academy and the National Gallery were jointly founded. His last work, a Self-portrait at the age of eighty, was painted in 1882. After a long and productive life, Plamondon died in Neuville on September 4, 1895.

Sources:
Gérard Morisset, "Antoine Plamondon (1804-1895)," Vie des Arts 3 (mai-juin 1956) 6-13.
R.H. Hubbard, Two Painters of Quebec: Antoine Plamondon (1802-1895) [and] Théophile Hamel (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1970).
Yves Lacasse, Antoine Plamondon 1804-1895: The Way of the Cross of the Church of Notre-Dame de Montreal (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Art, 1984).

Text: Alice Ming Wai Jim