Clarence Gagnon

Clarence Alphonse Gagnon was born in 1881 in Montreal, Quebec. Sources disagree on the exact day, with some giving November 8 and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography giving November 11, but all agree on the year and city. He attended the Academie du Plateau in Montreal, completing his studies there in June 1898 with a bronze medal in English. He then took evening art classes at the Council of Arts and Manufactures of the Province of Quebec and studied painting under William Brymner at the school of the Art Association of Montreal, continuing there to about 1903.

In 1904 Gagnon settled in Paris and enrolled at the Academie Julian, working in the studio of Jean-Paul Laurens. He then traveled and painted in France and Italy, returning to Canada around 1908 or 1909, with sources differing on the exact year.

Gagnon married Katherine Irwin in Paris in December 1907; she died of Spanish influenza in April 1919. He married Lucile Rodier in Westmount, Quebec, in June 1919. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography notes that no children were born of either marriage. He was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1922, and in 1923 received the Trevor Prize from the Salmagundi Club in New York. In 1933 he completed 54 small paintings illustrating Louis Hemon's Maria Chapdelaine, now held by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. He returned permanently to Montreal in 1936, and in 1938 the Universite de Montreal awarded him an honorary doctorate.

In his final year, Gagnon's health declined. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records that he died of pancreatic cancer at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal on January 5, 1942, at the age of 60, and was buried at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery.

Institutions have framed Gagnon's mature landscape work as a bridge between regionalism and Impressionism, using dense colour and light to record specific Quebec places rather than generalized scenery. His election to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1922 and his honorary doctorate from the Universite de Montreal in 1938 reflect a critical consensus, sustained through the twentieth century, that he was among the central painters of the Quebec landscape tradition.

Gagnon's auction record is Ice Harvest, Quebec, a 1935 oil on canvas that sold for CAD 984,000 (about USD 724,000) at Cowley Abbott in Toronto on December 6, 2023. Public auction databases do not provide a reliable, fully documented ranking of his next-highest results, so this record should be read as the clear ceiling of his market rather than one point on a smooth curve. There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne, so provenance and dealer expertise carry more weight in authentication. Several established Canadian galleries, including Loch Gallery, Masters Gallery Ltd., and Roberts Gallery, actively handle his paintings and prints on the secondary market, though no source confirms a single exclusive representative of his estate.

Gagnon's market is historical rather than active: he is not represented by a contemporary gallery or estate in the way a living artist would be, and pricing depends on a comparatively small number of public sales rather than a continuous auction record. The absence of a confirmed catalogue raisonne means collectors should weight provenance, exhibition history, and dealer expertise heavily when evaluating a work. Even his exact birth date is disputed among otherwise reliable sources, a reminder that biographical detail on historical Canadian artists can vary between institutions and should be checked against more than one primary source before it is treated as settled.