This image has haunted the collective imagination of Canadians for almost sixty years. Lemieux painted it in 1956, just after his return from a visit to France that had led him to question his perception of the landscape. “I no longer saw things the same way. A totally different vision was developing in me [. . .]; until then I had never noticed how horizontal our country is.” For Lemieux from this point on, winter and vast, snowy spaces would serve as the background to empty terrain, traversed by universal, silent, anonymous human figures.

This Spotlight is excerpted from Jean Paul Lemieux: Life & Work by Michèle Grandbois.