Dr. Ross de Belle is not the type to take it easy.
In 2020 the pediatrician, now 86, had only just retired from his Brossard practice—yes, he worked until he was well into his eighties—when the global COVID-19 disruption unexpectedly created the perfect conditions for staying in one place and focusing his energies on a single project. He didn’t have to look far to find an ideal one.
Dr. de Belle’s paternal grandfather, Charles de Belle, was a painter who died in 1939, the year after his grandson Ross was born. Learning about the eccentric Charles’ life and work through stories from his father, Louis, Ross came to a gradual appreciation over the following decades of his grandfather’s artistic achievement. Finally, believing it was high time there was a book about him, he set about making one, with practical assistance from various family members. The result, , proves to be a revelation, shining a light on a long-neglected figure whose work stands with the best of his era.
“He had such a unique talent,” said the ebullient de Belle in August, on the phone from the lakeside Pointe-Claire condo where he lives with his wife Kathryn McCloskey. “And he was such an odd character. I felt a sense of mission to make him better known.”
It says something about Charles de Belle’s low-key Montreal profile that his best-known work locally—the 1920 painting “In Flanders Fields,” gifted to McGill that same year—was seen only by people who happened to look up at where it was hung in the Strathcona Anatomy Building before it eventually got lost in the netherworld of archival storage. For nearly everyone coming to his work now, Heavenly will be an introduction, one that’s likely to beg a question: how could work of such obvious distinction have slipped into near-total obscurity? Part of the answer, it seems, goes back as far as the artist’s lifetime and his inherent disinclination to deal much with the commercial realm. As a chapter title in the book dryly puts it, he was “Not a Good Salesman.”
“He liked to say, ‘A painter paints to live, an artist lives to paint,’” said de Belle of his grandfather’s credo. “And he clearly thought of himself as an artist. All he thought about, day and night, was his art.”
As for the prickliness that may well have made potential buyers wary, the stories are many.
“My father told me that, especially as his father got older, he would go into rages,” de Belle said. “He’d step onto the bus or a streetcar and if some young fellow was sitting and not giving a woman his seat, he’d knock him on the knee with his cane and shout, ‘Get up!’”
Social niceties sometimes took a back seat in other settings, too. Sometimes at family gatherings, said de Belle, “He would walk around looking at the artworks on the walls and say, ‘These paintings are terrible! Let me give you one of mine.’”
A slim, elegantly designed book, Heavenly is a quick read. Acknowledging a relative paucity of surviving firsthand material on his grandfather’s life, de Belle makes efficient use of what’s available, keeping the narrative moving briskly along while allowing himself some speculative scope when it’s directly relevant to specific works. What’s here is absorbing enough, though. In addition to considerable family intrigue, events in the broader world make their presence felt: war, British royalty and a close brush with the first and last voyage of the Titanic are no more than a degree or two removed from centre stage. But generally the images are allowed to do the heavy lifting, and they’re more than equal to the task.
Among the works reproduced in Heavenly, an undoubted highlight is “Louis,” a portrait of the artist’s son (and the author's father), made when the subject was in his early teens. With its classical-style composition and sombre tones, it would look at home alongside a Whistler or a Sargent; indeed, Whistler was briefly Charles’ tutor. In a practice common in the Victorian and Edwardian eras—a time still fresh in the popular mind, both in Europe where the artist first made his name and in Quebec, where he settled in 1912—the boy in the painting could easily be taken for a young woman.
“My guess, knowing a bit about psychology and psychiatry, is that he wanted to acknowledge and recognize his son (by doing a portrait), but not having been fond of his own father—who was a bit of a scoundrel—he dressed the subject in black and made him look like a girl.”
In addition to hints of a cross-generation dynamic with complicated undertones, some more prosaic factors had a hand in Charles de Belle’s artistic process.
“Late in his life he had arthritis in his fingers, which made working in pastels too difficult,” said de Belle. “So he turned to oils. It’s a tribute to his skill that he was able to manipulate oils to resemble the delicacy of pastels.”
In the piece chosen for the book’s cover, a group study of four young women is complemented by ghost-like presences emerging dimly from the soft-focus backdrop; the haunting effect calls to mind Chagall. As with “Louis,” the resemblance to a predecessor’s style feels more like organic kinship than conscious homage.
It’s important not to overplay the “poverty” component of the book’s subtitle—it’s not as if Charles de Belle didn’t sell at all while he was alive. Heavenly includes a story of a group of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting making an impromptu visit to the artist’s London studio and promptly facilitating a lucrative sale of three pastels to the Queen herself. Closer to home, said de Belle, one of Charles’ buyers was the wealthy father of one-time Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau. What’s more, indications are that, even if he did show a certain disdain for the pursuit of money, Charles was far from indifferent to the idea of posterity. He took great care, for example, to store his vulnerable pastel works between panes of glass.
“He wanted to create something of beauty, something that would last,” said de Belle. “He wanted to express something that people would remember, and that would make them happy.”
For de Belle, the experience of creating Heavenly has had a satisfying full-circle aspect, not least because of its connections with his alma mater. When he mentions that the book is now in the collection at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, the pride in his voice is palpable. What’s more, having had a long and rewarding career, he relishes the chance to pay some of it forward to the place that helped set him on his path.
“I didn’t do this to make a lot of money,” he said. “I want a portion of the royalties to be given as a reward to McGill.”