Rita Mount

Heffel Auction House Biography and Notes

Montreal-born Rita Mount studied in Paris and at the Art Association of Montreal with William Brymner, and subsequently at the Art Students League in New York and Woodstock with Frank Vincent Du Mond. While Mount painted a number of canvases around the city of Montreal, she was primarily a landscape painter, and from 1923 she painted at Percé and around Gaspé and Cape Breton. "I admired the fine sailing boats one sees in the small ports and sheltered coves of Gaspé," she told a journalist from La Presse in 1932. And to a journalist from the Montreal Gazette, she identified Gaspé’s brighter colour as the principal attraction. One of her Gaspé canvases was bought by the National Gallery in 1924, and canvases of Percé were included in her solo exhibition at Morency Frères in 1939. L’Anse-aux-Gascons is situated on the northeast edge of Baie-des-Chaleurs and attracted other artists, including Marc-Aurèle Fortin. Mount exhibited paintings of nearby Port Daniel (now part of the municipality of Port-Daniel-Gascons) from as early as 1927, and paintings titled L’Anse aux Gascons, Gaspé in spring exhibitions in 1947 and 1948. Labels and inscriptions on the back of this work confirm that it was exhibited in the 1945 Spring Exhibition of the Art Association of Montreal, titled as Harbour. The brilliant greens of the water and fields contrast with the pastel tones of the beach and cliff and the blues of the rocks and shed roof that frame the small fishing cove. This painting was formerly in the collection of the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, a collection formed from the 1920s into the 1960s. The collection included paintings by Frederick Coburn, Robert Pilot, Maurice Cullen, A.Y. Jackson, Thoreau MacDonald and, most importantly, Anne Savage, who taught at Baron Byng High School from 1922 to 1948 and who played a key role in a number of its acquisitions. The collection was sold by Heffel in May and June 2013.