This painting, titled La Frénière by John Lyman, is an expressive oil landscape that beautifully captures a serene rural scene in early autumn.

Rendered with Lyman’s characteristic modernist restraint and lyrical
colour sense, the composition looks through a rhythmic arrangement of
slender tree trunks toward a reflective pond and a distant white
farmhouse. The artist uses soft lavender and muted blue in the sky,
contrasted with ochres, russets, and bright greens across the foliage
and ground, evoking a clear, sun-filled afternoon. His brushwork is
loose and fluid, with visible strokes that model the trees and ground in
a simplified, almost sculptural manner, showing influence from his
post-Impressionist training in Paris and his affinity with the
decorative modernism of artists like Cézanne and Matisse.

Painted in 1930, the scene reflects Lyman’s interest in balancing
structure and colour harmony, a hallmark of his landscapes around the
time he helped inspire a renewed modernist spirit in Quebec painting. La Frénière
exemplifies how he transformed Quebec’s pastoral settings into
meditative explorations of rhythm and light rather than literal
documentation — a refined synthesis of European modernism and Canadian
subject matter.