Forging Poetry Through Paint: William Blair Bruce’s “The Smiths”
William Blair Bruce, The Smiths, 1894. Oil on canvas, 127.8 x 198.8 cm. Purchased 1910. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC
In the tradition of many aspiring artists in the late 1800s, Hamilton-born painter William Blair Bruce (1859–1906) journeyed to Paris to gain professional training and recognition. Arriving in the summer of 1881, he briefly enrolled at the Académie Julian, but soon ventured beyond the Parisian atelier to seek inspiration and hone his style of painting outdoors in the French countryside.
Bruce visited France’s famed artists' colonies, including Barbizon and Giverny, where he was in the company of local and international artists. He forged a painting practice that suited his far-reaching ambition to create, in his own words, “pictures that will have more poetic feeling in a square inch than the other painters have in a square yard.” His intent was to convey feeling over facts, “the spiritual more than the earthly, poetry rather than prose,” as cited by Tobi Bruce and Anne Koval in Into the Light: The Paintings of William Blair Bruce (1859–1906).
The National Gallery of Canada’s The Smiths (1894), merges the structure of Academic painting with Impressionism’s emphasis on light and plein-air study, techniques that often intermingled during this period. It is a scene captured in Grez-sur-Loing, a riverside commune south of Paris on the border of the Fontainebleau forest. Bruce visited the area with his wife, the Swedish sculptor Caroline Benedicks, several times, including during the summer of 1893 when preparatory work for The Smiths was underway. The final, large-scale canvas was accepted by the Salon of the Société des artistes français in May 1894 as A la campagne; maréchaux ferrant des roues [In the Countryside; Blacksmiths Forging Wheels]. This was a continuation of Bruce’s judicious practice of submitting large canvases for the Salon. At just under two metres wide, The Smiths demanded attention from the jury, critics and the public.
William Blair Bruce, The Smiths (detail), 1894. Photo: NGC
The Smiths narrates four stages involved in forging a wheel. At bottom left, a large iron ring on the ground is being heated in a fire. In the centre of the composition, a group of blacksmiths surrounds a second ring on the fiery forge. Their activity and palpable strain to pull back on the hot iron ring is not unlike Bruce’s effort in painting a substantial canvas. The figures are partially engulfed by billowing smoke, which will be replaced by steam when water is poured onto the forge, forcing the hot rim to cool and contract around the wooden spokes of the wheel. For this reason, a man approaches from the right, bearing a heavy pail of water, drawn from the Loing River, which can be seen along the horizon line in the background. He bridges the gap between the joining of iron and wood on the forge, and a pair of completed wheels resting against a tree behind him. By bringing together each step of the forging process, The Smiths is a constructed painting that conveys Bruce’s poetic feeling rather than faithfully recording an actual event.
William Blair Bruce, Study for “The Smiths”: Compositional Sketch No. 1, 1893. Oil on canvas, 21.7 x 27.9 cm. Purchased 1986. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC
In keeping with the Academic approach to painting, Bruce utilized preparatory studies to draft The Smiths, several of which are in the Gallery's collection. The artist drew and painted segments that were later united in the large-scale canvas, as well as small-scale oil studies that explored the composition and overall tone of the picture. In Study for “The Smiths”: Compositional Sketch No. 1, the figures are almost completely obscured by smoke rising from bottom left This bathes the image in a grey wash that explores how sunlight and colour are veiled through the hazy atmosphere – an effect carried through to the final work.
William Blair Bruce, Study for “The Smiths”: Compositional Sketch No. 2, 1893. Oil on canvas, 26.5 x 34.3 cm. Purchased 1986. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC
In another study, Bruce established the main elements and narrative structure with sketchy brushwork in a high-key colour palette, including the acid green, medium blues and vermillion that appear in the final canvas. The overall effect is more vibrant, with the Salon piece blending the divergent tonality and brushwork of the two studies.
The Smiths was exhibited in a comprehensive posthumous retrospective of Bruce’s work in 1907 at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. As French critic Alphonse Séché wrote in the exhibition catalogue: “The Blacksmiths, [is] one of the most remarkable of paintings, with what extraordinary skill Blair Bruce makes us see and feel not only the hot vibrating rays of a summer sun, but also the heat waves thrown out from the hot irons radiating in the warm air. It is perfect reality, but I say reality and not realism for Blair Bruce had too great a poetic feeling ever to be brutally realistic. He is not content only to see nature. He thinks and dreams it, until it seems recreated and magnificent.” Three years later, The Smiths was purchased by the Gallery from Bruce's widow, Caroline Benedicks Bruce, for the national collection.
William Blair Bruce has come to be known as one of Canada's finest Impressionist painters, a position he earned through prodigious talent, stylistic exploration and astute exhibition planning. In both scale and subject, The Smiths is among his most significant paintings, works that find poetic moments in the everyday.
The Smiths by William Blair Bruce is on view in Room A104 in the Indigenous and Canadian Galleries at the National Gallery of Canada. Share this article and subscribe to our newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest articles, Gallery exhibitions, news and events, and to learn more about art in Canada.
