Artworks by William Blair Bruce at Important Winter Sale

It was in Barbizon, Fontainebleau and the surrounding areas that the first generation of French outdoor painters worked from the 1830s. A few decades later, these places would be populated by a younger generation of Swedish as well as international artists, most of whom became prominent in the new French-oriented landscape painting. Hugo Salmson is said to have been the first Swedish artist to visit the village of Grez, just south of the Fontaineblea forest, in 1874. Two years later, Oscar Törnå followed in his footsteps but did not appreciate the light, but instead sought his motifs in the cool light dark of the Fontaineblea forest. In April 1882, however, Karl Nordström arrived in the company of the Norwegian artists Christian Krohg and Christian Skredsvig. Unlike Törnå, Nordström (in a letter home to his brother) found the area around Grez "delightful beautiful, the weather perfectly summery, gentle rainforests, greenery and full of flowering fruit trees".

In the following years the group of artists in Grez was expanded, where a vibrant international artist colony operated in the mid-1880s. One of the artists attracted by Karl Nordström was Carl Larsson. After arriving in Grez in the early summer of 1882, Larsson wrote in a letter to August Strindberg: “You cannot imagine what poetry might be in such a petit village; a beautiful tree-lined river, a leafy and almost impenetrable bois on one side and possible cornfields on the other [...] The sun that radiates and gilds this is an endless credit ”.

It was also the sunlight and the open spaces that attracted this generation of artists. The realistic landscape painting practiced in Grez-sur-Loing was characterized by a pale color scale often dominated by bright ocher tones, gray, light blue and green. The landscape painters were attracted by the hazy French air's ability to match the landscape's colors in a uniformly light tone where strong contrasts and contradictions were lacking.

Despite a strikingly high Swedish presence, the artist colony in Grez was far from a true Swedish or Scandinavian affair. On the contrary, there were significant international elements, which have been shown, among other things by Alexandra Herlitz in her doctoral dissertation "Grez-sur-Loing revisited. The international artist's colony in a different light" (University of Gothenburg, 2013).

Canada's contribution to the Grez artist colony was William Blair Bruce (1859-1906). Bruce had arrived in Paris in 1881 to study at Académie Julian. The studies were supplemented by study trips to Barbizon where Bruce became acquainted with outdoor painting and impressionism (Bruce is today considered one of Canada's first impressionists). In 1885 Bruce Grez visited where he met, and fell in love with, the economically well-off Swedish artist Carolina Benedicks (1856-1935).