Gaston Rebry

Gaston Rebry (1933–2007, Belgium) immigrated to Montreal in 1954, leaving behind a career as a competitive cyclist to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. By the mid-1960s he was painting full-time, devoting his career to landscapes that reconstruct nature into luminous, idealized visions of forest, sky, and water. Rebry’s canvases are celebrated for their sensitivity to light and atmosphere, embodying a lifetime of communion with the natural world.Gaston Rebry (1933–2007, Menen, Belgium) immigrated to Canada in 1954 after the death of his father, settling in Montreal. Originally a competitive cyclist like his father, Rebry left the sport to pursue his passion for painting, studying first at the Menen Academy and later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal. Supporting himself as a travelling salesman, he painted in his spare hours until the mid-1960s, when he was able to devote himself fully to art.

Early in his career, Rebry produced portraits, village scenes, and houses, but by the 1980s he had turned exclusively to landscape. He rejected strict naturalism, instead reconstructing nature into luminous visions of sky, forest, and water—idealized worlds untouched by human presence. Light became his primary subject, captured in countless subtle shifts across foliage, water, and atmosphere. Each canvas distilled decades of observation and experience, works he described as “40 years in the making.”

Rebry’s landscapes, simultaneously meditative and expansive, expressed the beauty of his adopted country and secured him recognition as one of Canada’s leading painters. His works were presented as diplomatic gifts by former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, including to Pope John Paul II in 1998. By the early 2000s, art investment specialists ranked him among Canada’s top 50 painters for investment potential. Today, Rebry is remembered for his lifelong communion with nature and his enduring contribution to Canadian landscape painting.