James Wilson Morrice, 1865 – 1924
Born to an affluent Montreal family, Canadian artist James Wilson Morrice was an important Canadian landscape painter who studied with Henri Harpignies, as well at the Académie Julien in Paris, where he lived most of his life.
While he exhibited widely in Europe, at the galleries and salons of Paris and London, he kept in close touch with the Canadian art scene, and regularly sent paintings back to Canada for exhibition.
During a stop near Quebec City, he painted a study that would lead to the canvas for which he would be best known – ‘The Ferry, Quebec’. In it, he achieves what the critic Henri Marcel noted of Morrice that, “Nomadic Canadian that he is, he wanders from Venice to Brittany, fascinated by the delicate shades of gray on the water at twilight, by the rare colouration sometimes imparted to it by the reflection of a cloud.”