I think of J. W. Morrice as the man who painted grey snow. An astonishing fact, especially for a Canadian; and all the more incredible when you think of all that snow can mean. I have been trying to unravel the mystery of this grey snow.

The Ferry, Quebec

The Impressionist painters amongst whom Morrice lived in Paris and whom he imitated—chiefly Matisse—were famous for catching the effects of brilliant light and for fixing the delights of immediate existence on the canvas. Monet’s cathedrals are flooded with sunlight so that the eye sees only a blur of colour, a glowing oblong of light. I still remember the feeling of sharp anguish I felt in the Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris looking at Renoir’s painting “Le Déjeuner des canotiers,” with its dancehall scene, its lovers in sweaty shirts and girls in straw hats: the ephemeral moving present, that was so real on the canvas, yet had long vanished into non‑existence, swallowed in the annihilation of time. I don’t think that this is what the Impressionists intended; but as time passes, it is more and more the effect they produce, the irony of “the present moment” set off against an eternity of extinction. But to return to Morrice; his canvases contain neither the flooding light nor the intense immediate present of the Impressionists. They remain static and unchanging in their mood, from 1889 to 1924, and their colouring is always muted, mixed, dull—muddied with sadness.

Morrice had every reason to be happy: lots of money, time to travel, in France, on the Riviera, in North Africa, in the West Indies; a charming mistress; music, friends, absinthe, and a spacious artist’s studio in Paris. (His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer in Montreal.) His friendships included the painters Matisse and Toulouse‑Lautrec, the poets Verlaine and Paul Fort, the novelist Somerset Maugham. He was a gentleman and an artist, living in free voluntary exile in Paris. What more could anyone desire?

We can only judge by the paintings. Grey snow. (“L’ennemi de toute peinture est le gris,” said Delacroix.) There is even one painting, “Dieppe, the Beach, Grey Effect,” which calls attention to the grey matter. But they are all “grey effects,” or “brown effects,” or muted matte effects, aesthetic studies in the minor key of emotion, the sad contemplative stillness of an arrested sensibility.

The key to J. W. Morrice, I think, is that he is a Canadian on his travels. His destination is one that he never reaches, though others may reach it after him—it is Canada. We have all traveled. And all travel is a search for reality. To look at his paintings as a search for reality is to discover the point of his wanderings, his homeless paintings in Tangiers, his momentary light in Venice, dullness, and greyness everywhere. He never found something he had left very far behind, to which he could not return.

We look with fascination at his few paintings from 1900 to 1910 in which he depicted Canadian scenes. These are not the earliest paintings but they are immensely revealing. “View Towards Lévis from Québec,” “Return from School,” “Entrance to a Québec Village,” “Québec, Côte de la Montagne,” these paintings show us reality drained of meaning, the great sense of emptiness that later remains disguised in the subject matter of his European paintings. The children are gnome‑like adultish clods moving through a landscape of grey snow and sodden boredom. The “Entrance to a Village” is a scene from Kafka’s Castle, with its dumpy listless “villager” (his back turned toward us) approaching on his sled the group of huddled houses that never asked a question about God or dreamed of Satan, that sleep in the grey snow of listless actuality. This is a country that Morrice could not live with; he had found no reality here, and he went abroad looking for life, drinking, drifting, and daubing farther and farther afield, until his death in Tunis in 1924.

The two paintings of an earlier time, “Bois‑le‑roi” and “The Garden” (both 1896) are revealing in another way. They are nearer to the garden of childhood, with their bright colours and somewhat messy gaiety, but even here there is a watery kind of wistfulness and greyness to trouble the spontaneity of feeling. Among the later paintings, those that would be expected to capture something of the freedom of fantasy—the circus pictures—are scenes of dejection and disillusionment, with empty public benches, a barren circus ring, or a single clown heaped into a shapeless mass on the canvas.

The search for reality which was disappointed in actuality turned to art for its fulfillment. Obviously, Morrice must be looked at as a painterly painter; he must be valued for his “grey effects,” his ability to make grey appear as white, his compositional and harmonious resolutions. (“A colour in art is not a colour,” says the present‑day painter Ad Reinhardt; “. . . Dark grey in art is not dark grey.”) All that Morrice was thinking of, to be sure, was the painting as painting, never the subject matter as meaning. His best successes like the “Public Gardens, Venice” and “The Promenade, Dieppe,” are almost as pure as Seurat in their devotion to design. They are excellent paintings. But the subject matter is the ultimate bridge to life, and to the onlooker’s mind and heart. Even in abstract painting you can tell whether the painter is emotionally dead or alive. When all the life is arrested on the canvas, in aestheticism, it is only a residue, the dregs of disappointment. Morrice was disappointed or deprived early in life; his painting is virtually static in its emotional consistency. Like many Canadians before and since, he could find no reality in his native environment—or only a negative response—and he could find no happy substitute in the world abroad, only a white greyness. “A bird that cannot settle anywhere,” Matisse said of him. And that is the heart of the matter.

Dudek, Louis. "The Search for Reality: J.W. Morrice" The Gazette, 30 October 1965. Rpt. in In Defence of Art: Critical Essays & Reviews. Ed. Aileen Collins. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1988, pp.253-255.