James Wilson Morrice Giclée Fine Art Prints

James Wilson Morrice emerged from Montreal's prosperous Scottish merchant class to become Canada's most internationally recognised painter of the early twentieth century. Born on 10 August 1865 to David Morrice and Annie Stevenson Anderson, he possessed from childhood what his sister Annie Mather recalled as an early propensity for drawing and sculpture. This inclination toward visual expression would ultimately triumph over the conventional career path laid before him.

His education followed the trajectory expected of his social position: secondary schooling at Montreal Proprietary School from 1878 to 1882, where drawing lessons perhaps first gave structure to his artistic impulses, followed by legal studies at the University of Toronto. The watercolours from 1879 depicting New England coastlines where his family summered suggest an eye already attuned to landscape's subtleties. Called to the Ontario bar in 1889, Morrice would never practise law, having already begun exhibiting with the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Ontario Society of Artists the previous year.

The year 1890 marked his decisive departure for Europe, initiating a pattern of perpetual movement that would characterise his entire career. Based first in London, then Paris from 1892, he established himself at 9 Rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse. His training included periods at the Académie Julian and with Henri Harpignies in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, though formal instruction seems to have yielded quickly to independent exploration. The sketchbooks from 1893-95 trace journeys through Normandy, Italy, Holland, and Belgium - the beginning of what Henri Matisse would later describe as the migrations of "a little like a migrating bird but without any fixed landing place."

The encounter with Robert Henri in 1896 proved transformative, introducing urban subjects to Morrice's repertoire and darkening his palette. Their friendship, lasting until Henri's return to America in 1900, coincided with Morrice's first Paris exhibition at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Yet it was Maurice Galbraith Cullen who, during Morrice's Canadian sojourn of 1896-97, revealed the chromatic possibilities of Quebec winter light. The painting Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré (1897) demonstrates this liberation into brighter hues, marking a crucial evolution in his colour sensibility.

By 1899, Morrice had established his studio at 45 Quai des Grands-Augustins, which would remain his Paris base for over fifteen years. His exhibition schedule expanded internationally: the Pennsylvania Academy, the Venice Biennale (where he became the first Canadian participant in 1903), the Munich Sezession, and numerous venues across America and Europe. Recognition followed: a silver medal at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, election as an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, French government acquisition of Quai des Grands-Augustins, and purchase of works by Russian collector Ivan Morozov.

The North African journeys beginning in 1912 opened another phase of chromatic exploration. In Tangier, working alongside Charles Camoin and Matisse, Morrice discovered luminosities that further transformed his palette. Cuba in 1915 provided similar revelations. These tropical experiences, combined with his appointment to paint for the Canadian War Memorials Fund in 1917, sustained his productivity through the war years despite declining health exacerbated by what Matisse diplomatically termed "an unfortunate craving for whisky."

Morrice's method remained consistent throughout these transformations: small pochades painted from life, sketchbooks filled with notations of colour and composition, then studio elaboration into full-scale canvases. His style evolved from the multidirectional brushstrokes of the 1890s through the tonal patches influenced by Whistler and Henri, to the bright colours discovered in Canada, the decorative concerns absorbed from the Nabis, and finally the simplified compositions and pure tones inspired by North Africa and Matisse. The late works employed minimal impasto, incorporating bare canvas or panel into the composition, with drawn lines made with stylus or brush handle creating linear elements within the paint.

When tuberculosis claimed him at a Tunis military hospital on 23 January 1924, Morrice had participated in over 140 exhibitions across thirty-six venues internationally. Louis Vauxcelles had proclaimed him in 1909 as Whistler's successor and "unquestionably the American painter who has achieved in France and at Paris...the most notable and well-merited place in the world of art." More significantly, he had established a model of Canadian artistic internationalism, maintaining deep connections to his homeland while refusing its geographical limitations. His legacy resides not merely in the influence on painters like John Lyman, who recognized in him "pure 'painting poetry'", but in demonstrating that Canadian art could achieve significance within the broader currents of international modernism.