THE ART OF JAMA

From an Upstairs Window, Winter L. L. FitzGerald Thomas B. Cole, MD, MPH

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outh of Winnipeg, the capital city of the Canadian province of Manitoba, is mostly farmland, and north of the city is a region of lakes and boreal coniferous forest. Still farther north is the estuary of the Churchill River, where thousands of polar bears gather in November to hunt seals on the ice of Hudson Bay. Winter can be severe in Manitoba, especially when high-pressure air masses blow down from the Arctic Circle. The average snowfall near Winnipeg is 126 cm per year and blizzards are frequent, yet Manitoba has the clearest skies in Canada: good for painting in the daytime and viewing the aurora borealis at night. Winter activities in Winnipeg include river skating and cross-country skiing, but when the air is so cold and dry that it takes your breath away, the prudent course of action is to stay inside where it is warm. From an Upstairs Window, Winter, by the Canadian painter Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890-1956), is a view from indoors looking out at a Winnipeg snowfall. On the interior windowsill are a pencil, sketchpad, and pitcher of water, and beyond the frosty plane of the window is a view of the artist’s backyard. The still life in the foreground communicates with the landscape geometrically (the angles of the window frame and roof lines, the organic forms of the pitcher and bare trees) and tonally, with echoes of white in the pitcher and the snow. FitzGerald was born in Winnipeg and lived his entire life there, making occasional trips to Canadian and US cities for periods of training or to visit museums and galleries. As a boy he spent summer vacations on his grandmother's farm near the little town of Snowflake, just a few kilometers from the US border. After he became a painter he returned often to the farm to take advantage of the full skies and open views. FitzGerald left school at the age of 14 to take a series of unappealing clerical jobs. He thought he might like to draw, so he bought a pencil and eraser to sketch trees and buildings. At the Winnipeg Public Library he found an 1857 edition of The Elements of Drawing by John Ruskin, which stresses fundamental technique and trains the eye to observe natural forms; this manual became a major influence on FitzGerald’s subsequent work. In 1909 he took instruction from A. S. Keszthelyi, a Hungarian artist who had taught at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and the Art Students League of New York. With this background FitzGerald was able to find work as a commercial artist, arranging window displays, painting theater backdrops, and decorating interiors. In his spare time he painted, and in 1913 he was invited to participate in an exhibition at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in Montreal. In 1918 the National Gallery of Canada purchased one of his paintings, and in 1921 he had his first solo exhibition. Over the winter of 1921-1922 he honed his skills at the Art Students League with Boardman Robinson and Kenneth Hayes Miller. In 1924, FitzGerald be2370

gan teaching at the Winnipeg School of Art and was promoted to principal of the school in 1929. In 1928 he exhibited some paintings at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto, a venue familiar to the Group of Seven. The Group of Seven was a Toronto-based alliance of artists who shared ideas with one another on painting the natural beauty of the Canadian landscape, with an emphasis on modern techniques. Members of the group went on painting excursions together, initially within the province of Ontario and subsequently to British Columbia, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and the Arctic. In the early 1930s the Group of Seven established its reputation as a national school of painting by recruiting members from outside Toronto, including FitzGerald from Winnipeg and Edwin Holgate from Montreal. It then reorganized as the Canadian Group of Painters and held its first exhibition in 1933. FitzGerald no doubt appreciated the recognition, but it made little difference to his lifestyle or his work. He didn’t go in for the Group of Seven’s expeditions or strike out on his own like the British Columbian painter Emily Carr, who visited First Nations villages to study indigenous art (JAMA cover, February 22/29, 2012). He was happy to paint trees, houses, and still lifes, sometimes in oils and sometimes in watercolor. Fitzgerald worked slowly; it could take him a year or more to complete a painting. He liked to have several works in progress because each of them, he said, assisted the others. FitzGerald’s style was influenced by the French painters Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne and the American painter Charles Sheeler. From the study of paintings by Seurat, FitzGerald learned to place tiny brushstrokes of related or complementary colors in close proximity to create an impression of movement (JAMA cover, May 11, 2011). He emulated Cézanne by reducing natural objects to their intrinsic, geometric shapes and by tilting flat surfaces forward to create visual tension. The pleasing, organic form of the pitcher in From an Upstairs Window, Winter and the colored shadows on its surface draw the eye, and the tilted window sill welcomes the viewer into the room. Sheeler’s influence supported FitzGerald’s natural inclination to simplify the forms of the objects in his paintings by deleting extraneous detail. Although Sheeler’s subjects were industrial rather than natural landscapes (JAMA cover, October 13, 2010), the concept was the same—to disregard the inessential. The grooming of natural forms in From an Upstairs Window, Winter is best seen in the sinuous lines of the branches, which are free of rough spots, broken twigs, or derelict bird’s nests. The neighboring houses and the forest in the distance emphasize a human connection to the natural world, a recurrent theme in Canadian art. To highlight this connection, FitzGerald had to look no farther than his own backyard.

JAMA December 11, 2013 Volume 310, Number 22

Copyright 2013 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.

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The Art of JAMA

L. L. FitzGerald (1890-1956), From an Upstairs Window, Winter, circa 1950-1951, Canadian. Oil on canvas. 61 × 45.7 cm. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada (http://www.gallery.ca/en/), Ottawa, Ontario. Photo © NGC.

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JAMA December 11, 2013 Volume 310, Number 22

Copyright 2013 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.

Downloaded From: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/ by a J H Quillen College User on 06/05/2015

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From an upstairs window, winter: L. L. FitzGerald.

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