Gardens | Estevan Lodge | Temporary Exhibition
Room Thérèse Beaulieu-Roy (Estevan Lodge): In the Land - Paintings by Louise Belcourt
Louise Belcourt is a landscape based abstract painter who works with the tension between the natural and the man-made. She uses a seemingly simple range of shapes and perspectives to infuse air and light with psychological resonance. The landscapes are most often partial views of hedges in the environs of Métis-sur-Mer (where she works in the summer), or buildings along the waterfront in Brooklyn, New York (where she lives). There is a palatable sense of solitude, fertility, need and love communicated without narrative through the composition of the work and through its combination of abstraction and representation, the classical and the unexpected.
A graduate of Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, she has won awards from the Pollock-Krasner and the Elizabeth Greenshields foundations. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, Basel and numerous galleries in New York including Peter Blum, Greenberg-Van Doren and Jeff Bailey. Reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Art in America, Time Out NY, Art News and various other publications. Her work can be found in many private and international collections including the Deutsche Bank and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Métis-sur-Mer.
Rooms of Estevan Lodge: The Temple of Flora
The Temple of Flora is the fruit of the rich imagination of Robert Thornton (1768-1837), an English doctor and naturalist. In 1797, after inheriting a family fortune, Thornton gave up the practice of medicine to devote himself entirely to publishing this work. His ambition was to publish a botany book featuring nearly 90 plates and of better quality than any existing work in the field.
Thornton called on eminent painters specialized in botanical illustration such as Peter Henderson, Philip Reinagle or Abraham Pether, and he teamed up with the best engravers in London. The first engravings of The Temple of Flora, or Garden of Nature, Picturesque Botanical Plates of the New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus were published in 1799; the entire set of thirty-two plates was completed in 1807.
The coloured engravings in this first edition were of interest, not only as a testimony to the history of botany, but also for their formal qualities. These mezzotints (a technique used to create subtle shades of colour) and aquatints (a technique similar to etching) are sometimes set off with colours applied by hand. Executed with great delicacy, the plants people exotic landscapes bathed in a calm and serenity characteristic of the pre-Romantic spirit. The result is surprising. The great care used to execute the drawings expresses a certain candour, and the harmony of the colours conserves a freshness, which still stimulates our curiosity two centuries later.
