This painting was inspired by Paul Peel’s stay at an American artists’ colony in Pont Aven, France. The period was productive, and of the several canvases he completed there in 1881, four were selected for exhibition by the RoyalCanadianAcademy.

Pont Aven was significant for Peel in other ways. For instance, it marked Peel’s figurative “stepping stone” before settling in Paris and seeking art instruction from Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose studio was within the famous École Nationale des Beaux-arts. Peel would certainly have echoed the sentiments of 19^th-century American painter-cum-inventor Samuel Morse, who felt studying art in Paris was a professional imperative. Morse declared simply, “My education as a painter is incomplete without it.”¹ As early as the 1830s aspiring artists from the United States and Canada made the difficult journey to what was perceived, for the remainder of the century, to be the heart of Western culture.

Pont Aven was also significant to Peel for personal reasons. Three years later it was there that he met his future wife, painter Isaure Fanchette Verdier. The two would marry in 1886 and use Paris as their home base, travelling frequently back to Canada and around Europe until Peel’s death in 1892.

1. quoted in David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (New York: Simon 7 Schuster, 2011), 8.