Painter John Little.Alan Klinkhoff Gallery
John Little, who died in Montreal on Oct. 29 at the age of 96, was a painter best known for his city scenes, in particular of his native Montreal along with Quebec City and New York. Many of his paintings are of working-class neighbourhoods now being gentrified. He came to dislike the way the centres of cities, especially Montreal, were bulldozed for expressways and high rises.
“If we knock down all our old buildings and neighbourhoods, we’ll become a people without a past,” Mr. Little said in one of the few interviews he gave in his long life, in this case to Maclean’s magazine in 1961. “My motto is new plumbing for old buildings. I don’t mean to preserve everything but there is so much in this city worth preserving.”
His street scenes reflected his concern about ruining the character of urban landscapes. “I often refer to John as the Jane Jacobs of Canadian art,” said Alan Klinkhoff, who owns galleries in Montreal and Toronto that represented Mr. Little.
“He is the absolutely premier Canadian city painter; he spent 65 years chronicling the Canadian downtown,” added Mr. Klinkhoff, whose father, the late gallerist Walter Klinkhoff, represented Mr. Little starting in the 1960s.
Mr. Little was a shy man, not an obsessive recluse, but someone who stuck to his art. He did speak to a lot of sportswriters, though, because he was a big sports fan who once lived near the Montreal Forum, home of the Montreal Canadiens.
John Geoffrey Caruthers Little was born in Montreal on Feb. 20, 1928. His father, Harold, was an architect and his mother, Eileen (née Craig), a homemaker. At first the family lived in an apartment on Décarie Boulevard, long before it became an expressway. They later moved to the posh inner suburb of the Town of Mount Royal, where John went to school.
He discovered his artistic talent at an early age, and also his love of the cityscape. He would often skip school and go downtown to cabarets and theatres in places far grittier than the well-groomed lawns of the Town of Mount Royal. He quit school at 16 and his father encouraged him to study art if he wasn’t going to graduate from high school.
At first, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. “They practiced strict classical drawing. He found that so constricting. He wanted to draw hockey players and streets,” Mr. Klinkhoff wrote in his gallery’s book on Mr. Little.
Next Mr. Little studied under Arthur Lismer at the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), and then in 1947 Mr. Little went to New York.
“I spent most of my time roaming around N.Y. going to the Art Students League now and then,” Mr. Little recalled. “My real fun was going around New York with my sketchbook, the fish market, the subway.”
In 1948 he landed a job as an illustrator for the popular syndicated cartoon strip Bruce Gentry, by Ray Bailey. There was a lot of competition for jobs like that, so it showed his artistic talent had matured. At the time he thought he would be an illustrator, not a painter.
The next year he was mugged by “a couple of Bleecker Street Boys,” as he described them. He spent some time in the hospital, then was shipped back to Montreal “with my tail between my legs.”
Back in Montreal he worked as a draftsman for his father’s architectural firm. Then he went to Nova Scotia with a friend, Jack Gray, who also went on to become a successful painter. On that trip he met and fell in love with Lorraine McMahon; they were married in Pence, N.S., in May, 1952.
Around this time, Mr. Little decided to paint full-time. Ms. Little worked in a clerical job to support them, though she ended up being his very effective business manager. In 1952, he sold a painting for $300 through Watson Art Galleries. At the same time he started doing covers for Maclean’s, also for $300 (equivalent to $3,427 today, according to the Bank of Canada’s Inflation Calculator).
“If the original Maclean’s cover [artwork] were available in the art market today it would probably go for $20,000,” Mr. Klinkhoff said.
Les jeunes joueurs et leur patinoire rue Maria, St. Henri, Montreal (1970), by John Little.Courtesy of Alan Klinkhoff Gallery/Supplied
The couple’s apartment on Tupper Street in downtown Montreal was just a short walk from the Montreal Forum and Mr. Little would often sneak in to watch the Canadiens practice. It was the era of Rocket Richard and Boom-Boom Geoffrion. The sports-crazy Mr. Little was in heaven.
When the Littles moved into a coach house on Lincoln Street, their neighbours were the Mosher family, including young Terry Mosher, who would later be known for his editorial cartoons, signed “Aislin.” Terry would hang around Mr. Little’s studio and watch and learn. Mr. Little became Terry’s official godfather when the boy was baptised at the age of 9 in a downtown Anglican church. The two remained lifelong friends.
“He inspired me more than anyone else,” Mr. Mosher said. “He captured so much of working-class Montreal in his paintings. I believe he is one of Canada’s greatest painters, but then I am a little biased.”
In November, 1957, Watson Art Galleries held an exhibition of Mr. Little’s paintings. It was favourably reviewed by the Montreal Gazette: “His figures have animation, there is a convincing sense of movement in the crowds and the impression of traffic congestion in the narrow streets is capitally conveyed.”
Along with the streets of Pointe St. Charles, Mr. Little loved Sherbrooke Street and painted it often. He described it as: “one of the few really graceful streets in Canada. It was once like a giant banquet table with rich food and rare wines.”
Mr. Little and others thought Sherbrooke Street was ruined by the illegal demolition of the Van Horne Mansion and McGill University destroying the Prince of Wales Terrace, a row of elegant 19th-century townhouses, which he painted before they were replaced by a dull modern block.
Though he made a good living as a painter, Mr. Little was not rich.
Escaliers Tournet, Pointe St. Charles, Montreal (1969), by John Little.Courtesy of Alan Klinkhoff Gallery/Supplied
“He was not a talented salesman,” Mr. Mosher said.
For one thing, he liked to keep the price of his paintings low enough so that ordinary people could buy them. Though his wife once suggested putting prices up slightly to make room for other artists at the lower end of the market.
“John and Lorraine Little have never sought costly distractions and never been financially ambitious. He always offered his paintings at prices that were arguably inexpensive compared to his peers,” Mr. Klinkhoff wrote.
Mr. Little stopped painting about seven years ago. His wife, Lorraine, died in 2016. He leaves his two sons, Brian and Roger.
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