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In
a desolate snowy landscape lit by the eerie light of the moon,
a man with snowshoes lashed to his back falls in the snow and
reaches toward a phantom striding by, apparently indifferent to
his plight.
Does
the phantom represent a hoped-for saviour or the shadow of death?
In
a letter to his mother, William Blair Bruce identified his inspiration
as C.D. Shanly's poem Walker in the Snow, thus clarifying the
phantom's sinister mission:
"For
I saw by the sickly moonlight, / That the walking of the stranger
/ Left no footprints in the snow /...I had seen the shadow hunter
/ And had withered in his blight."
Bruce
painted this work (also known as The Phantom Hunter) at a time
when the Canadian press was calling for the establishment of a
national art imbued with Canadian themes. In correspondence with
his mother, he reported his pride in the acceptance of this subject
at the Paris Salon of 1888. It was Bruce's second start as an
artist in Paris. In 1881, he had studied at the Académie
Julian and at Barbizon, a village south of Paris, but his work
from this period was lost in a shipwreck in the St. Lawrence in
1885. Returning to France in 1887, he spent time in Giverny, where,
in the company of other Canadian, American and Scandinavian artists,
he painted en plein air, directly from nature, using Impressionist
techniques to render the landscape.
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