CULLEN, Maurice Galbraith - b. 1866 St. John's, Newfoundland, d. 1934 Chambly

Canadian painter. In 1870 he moved with his family to Montreal, which became his principal home. After taking drawing lessons in local art schools and studying sculpture with Louis-Philippe Hébert (1850-1917) from 1884 to 1887, he went in 1888 to study in Paris. He was elected an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1895.

On his return to Montreal, he found his preferred subject-matter: the tempered winter landscape (e.g. Logging in Winter, Beaupré, 1896; Hamilton, Ontario, Art Gallery). Later trips to Europe in 1896 and from 1900 to 1902 reinforced his admiration for late Impressionism. In his views of Québec (c. 1900-1910), typified by The Old Ferry, Louise Basin (1907; Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada), Cullen infused the atmospheric, inhabited landscape with the grandeur of panorama painting. Unlike his friend James Wilson Morrice, he sought to convey good design in nature rather than impose it on his landscape compositions. In his cityscapes of Montreal (1909-16), Cullen successfully reconciled man and nature, Impressionism and the academic tradition; but he also retained a sense of the romantic and the picturesque.

Cullen exhibited with the Canadian Art Club. In the early 1920s, after serving in Europe as a war artist, his painting became more conservative with increasing emphasis on the factual. When Cullen died, his ‘tempered Impressionism’ had long been rejected, but his evocation of the familiar later influenced Canadian modernism.

Winter at Moret

Maurice Galbraith Cullen was the first to establish the name and fame of Impressionism in Canada, and was the only one of his generation to adopt an Impressionist style rigorously and arrive at a personal manner of art by that route. He acquired a love of plein-air painting in France which remained with him his whole life long. It was in his winter landscapes that he evolved the light effects that are unique to his art, in such paintings as Winter at Moret. Cold, phosphorescent blues predominate, but reddish stray reflections of light radiate a magic warmth.