Painting in Canada

THE brief history of Canadian art is much less known than that of art in the U.S., but nearly as respectable. Reflecting a stable, rural, sparsely populated land, Canadian art has been even more provincial than U.S. painting, and full of vigor. A sizable show at Canada's National Gallery in Ottawa brings together some of the nation's best canvases. The color pages, opposite and overleaf, are a sampling of the exhibition.

P: Franc,ois Malepart de Beaucourt, who painted the Negro Slave, was Canada's first artist of international caliber. Trained in France, he developed a slick and brisk technique which well suited his obvious purpose: to charm. Copley and Stuart, American contemporaries, were deeper students of character, but not of paint.

P: Wilhelm Von Moll Berczy's family portrait of the Woolseys had scores of contemporary U.S. counterparts. Born in Saxony, Berczy adventured through Europe, brought a group of German settlers to New York State and then led them on into Canada. With the quietude of age, he turned to architecture and workmanlike portraiture. He charged a fee for each of the Woolseys in the picture, but in a note on the back of the canvas, Berczy notes that its real hero, the dog, "was added without cost."

P: Cornelius Krieghoff fought for the U.S. against the Indians, then went over the hill into Canada and became Quebec's most popular artist. Influenced by Currier & Ives, he produced a rich record of mid-19th century life in the snowy north.

P: Ozias Leduc is a Quebec brother to Philadelphia's late Thomas Eakins. His Madame Lebrun, painted in 1899, has the same passionate sobriety that made Eakins great. Both men began with Rembrandt, but neither knuckled under to the old master. They were as true to their age and hemisphere as Rembrandt had been to his. To portraitists of such quality, models are not only flesh and bones in a chair but also thoughts and feelings in the air. Madame Lebrun's sad, narrow gaze--as much as her elegant blouse and the stiffness of her spine--is forever Victorian.

P: Alexander Jackson was one of a band of seven nature painters who far surpassed New York's bland "Hudson River School." To picture the raw splendor of Canada's glaciers, frozen lakes and jack-pine forests, they developed a rough & ready brand of French Impressionism, with broader strokes and darker colors. In the 1920s Canadian critics inclined to scoff at the group; now that its efforts are history, it is becoming more and more revered.

P: Goodridge Roberts studied in Manhattan with John Sloan, Max Weber and Boardman Robinson, will soon travel to Paris on a Canadian government fellowship. Like most contemporary Canadian painters, he feels closer to Paris than to New York. After Jackson's "Group of Seven," Roberts' art looks cool and quiet as an anticlimax ought to be.

Where will Canadian painting go from here? The answer seems to be: anywhere and everywhere. Her painters are individualists with more temerity than training. In a time of fast-growing wealth and expanding horizons, Canadian art should be full of surprises.

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