LOUIS DE NIVERVILLE. RCA. [b. 1933].

 

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Louis de Niverville was born in 1933 in Andover, England where his father, an Air Vice-Marshal of the Royal Canadian Air Force, was stationed. He came to Canada with his parents in 1934, first settling in Montreal, then in 1953 in Ottawa. Louis received considerable encouragement from his brother Georges, a trained artist, to pursue a career in art. He specialized in illustrations, working for Mayfair magazine, and the CBC graphics department besides exploring venues for his own work. He was interested in Symbolism and Surrealism and exhibited paintings dealing with dreams and nightmares at the Jerrold Morris Gallery with Sol Littman in the 1970s. Even in his more "innocent" paintings of the 1960s, viewers often perceived a "vague element of threat," which marks the work of many Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst or Salvador Dali. Louis de Niverville acknowledged wide-ranging influences on his work, from the American cartoonists Saul Steinberg and James Thurber to the French painters Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. His first solo show was at the Gallery of Contemporary Art [1957, 1959], followed by exhibitions at the Here and Now Gallery in Toronto [1959, 1967] and elsewhere. His paintings were included in the 4th, 5th, and 6th Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Painting [1961, 1963, and 1965]. His works are part of many Canadian and international private and public collections.

[Biographical note courtesy of RBC, Corporate Art Collection, website].

Provenance: Imperial Oil of Canada, Art Collection. bearing inventory cataloguing labels on verso.