Horatio Walker

Heffel Auction House Biography and Notes

Canadian-born painter Horatio Walker is known for his depictions of rural Quebec, for which he achieved international acclaim in the early twentieth century. While Walker never received a formal art education, as a teenager he worked at a Toronto photographic firm, and studied under artists Robert Ford Gagen, John Fraser and Lucius O’Brien. In 1882 Walker traveled to Europe, and in the decades following lived throughout the northeastern United States. Given Walker’s international experience, he was well acquainted with the French Barbizon school, and was particularly influenced by Jean-Francois Millet’s depictions of French peasant farmers. Like Millet and the Barbizon, Walker sought to represent everyday rural subjects in a natural and dignified manner. Walker received numerous gold medals at exhibitions throughout the United States, and a bronze medal at the Paris World Exhibition (1889). He was a co-founder of the Arts Club of Canada in 1907, and succeeded his friend Homer Watson as its president in 1915. In the first years of twentieth century – when Moonrise, A Canadian Pastoral, was painted – Walker was at the height of his professional success. Many of Walker’s major paintings were produced during this period, including Ploughing the First Gleam at Dawn (1900) and The Ice Cutters (1904), both in the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Like Millet’s nocturnal renderings, Moonrise, A Canadian Pastoral is a highly atmospheric scene: warm golden moonlight illuminates the group of figures at work in the field, with the distant townscape remaining shaded in the background. The standing figure pauses while his companion harnesses the bulls to the plough. Underscoring the simple and transient nature of rural beauty, Walker’s shepherd savours a fleeting, peaceful moment before the evening’s work resumes.