Bonaventure Island - Poetic Landmark

Poetic Landmark

Bonaventure Island has been an important source of inspiration to numerous artists and poets. The surrealist writer André Breton declared that, while working on his novel Arcane 17, as he stayed in Percé (1944), he would never tire watching the birds of the Island. The Island never ceased to attract painters and writers : the American painter Frederick James (d. 1905), Franco-Germans Claire et Yvan Goll (1946), — by the sixties several artists would spend the summer on the Island, and would stay over the summer with the inhabitants -descendants of Irish and Norman settlers- the best known of whom was the naturalist William Du Val. Among these inspired visitors: painter Jacques Hurtubise and Kittie Bruneau, the sculptor Morton Rosengarten, the poet Michaël La Chance. Artists and landowners were evicted in the seventies.