Copse of Trees Olive
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Copse of Trees Olive


Stanley Morel Cosgrove
Signed and numbered artist proof EA 16/25
Cotton Rag Arches Paper
(image size 18 x 13.25 in )
$145.00

(1911 – 2002) Canadian Group of Painters, RCA

Born in Montreal, Quebec, he studied art at the Ecole des Beaus-Arts, Montreal, at the age of 26 and afterwards at the Art Association of Montreal where he took figure painting under Edwin Holgate. He enjoyed the rare honour of being invited to exhibit, while still a student, at the Provincial Museum of Quebec in 1939. About this time he was following the work of French painters like Braque and Rouault. He received a scholarship from the Province of Quebec in the earlier part of the year and had the intention of studying in France for four years but the outbreak of the Second World War forced him to change his plans. He was allowed to study on the American continent and he chose New York. Cosgrove arrived in New York with his wife but after two months found it unsatisfactory and finally went to Mexico.

On his return to Canada in 1944 he concentrated for a time on still lifes, using colours, sometimes with distorted forms and sometimes more representational, showing traces of Braque. Some of his portraits had the characteristic outlines, particularly in the face, of work by Rouault proving highly effective. In 1953, Cosgrove was awarded a Government fellowship to study in France.

Paul Duval in his “Canadian Drawings and Prints” ranked Cosgrove among the gifted of Canadian draughtsmen and used two examples of his drawing for illustration. Dorothy Pfeiffer in a review o Cosgrove’s 1961 exhibition at the Dominion Gallery, Montreal, stated, “…The salient qualities of Cosgrove’s fresco-like paintings of woody landscapes, still life, portraits and figures studies…would appear to lie in their combined purity and certainty of expression; in their unusual transparency and depth of colour and texture; as well as in a certain mystical sense of detachment from the hurly-burly of everyday life…” His work was also exhibited at the Continental Galleries in Montreal and the Laing Galleries in Toronto.