The acquaintance with Jobin has now extended over several summers and in that time we have learned from this old Canadian woodcarver’s lips many a legend of the Saints, legends that have none of the usual cut-and-dried wording of a book as they are told by this old man of Quebec, but all the vitality and realism which only one having working knowledge of them for a lifetime can give.
Monsieur Jobin, in point of years far up in the seventies, gives Saint Raymond as his birthplace but says that he spent much of his boyhood at Point aux Trembles above Quebec.
His answer to an inquiry if he carved or whittled much when a youngster, proved him a man of humour. “O, oui! I cut up all my father’s firewood into something or other.” Smiling at the recollection of those days he paused and raised himself chisel in hand. “There was a good deal of wood in my figures then. Their bodies were—what you call?—clumsy.” “Clumsy?” “Yes?”
But these early attempts were evidently of sufficient merit to determine his parents as to a trade for him. They apprenticed Louis to the woodcarver’s trade under M. Francois Xavier Berlingeret, a master carver of the city, of the generation before Jobin, so that Jobin represents in direct line a century of Canadian wood-carving. Jobin served three years. “Religious figures?” we inquired. “Oh, no. All sorts of carving with M’sieu Berlingeret. Some religious figures too, but in those days it was mostly ‘figureheads’.” Big wooden ships were everywhere.
“You know the figurehead?” He seemed very happy when we answered affirmatively. As his mind turned back to those days there came into his eye all the light and fire of an artist recalling some old masterpiece.
* * * *
His apprenticeship to Monsieur Berlingeret over, Jobin set out for New York “to finish”. In New York he worked for a year with Mr. Bolton, “John Bolton, an Englishman located at St. John Street, Battery Place”.
The mere mention of those New York days recalls to mind old haunts and famous old “figureheads” and carvers of Gotham. It was all “downtown” in those days,—“Battery Place” and “Castle Garden”. Then naturally followed talk of this carver and that, of this and that old sea-rover among the wind-jammers coming in and sailing out of New York fifty years ago.
It requires little imagination for us to be able to see this young French-Canadian artist in wood passing from one to another of these ships, searching with his artist’s eye for fine specimens of the figurehead-carver’s art on the bows. It was in reality like a morning spent in a Cosmopolitan Gallery wherein the work of artists from many lands appeared—here, a Scotchman, there a Dane, here a Norwegian, there a Nova Scotian. And when the latter, it was like happening suddenly upon “an old friend from home”.