Autumn Santa

Before the snow, there is the harvest. The Autumn Santa shows Father Christmas in the weeks when the year turns, out on a country road at dusk with his lantern lit, carrying the harvest home.

He is hand-poured into a tall antique mould, the long hood rising to a soft point, and finished in hand-painted oils at The Vaillancourt Studios. His coat is the orange of turning maples, belted with knotted cord, and below the waist it opens into a countryside that wraps all the way around him: a white clapboard house and a weathered barn under a clear blue sky, maples in orange and gold, a sandy lane edged in green. Turn him and the landscape goes on, with more houses and an outbuilding half hidden among the leaves, so that he seems less to wear the season than to walk through it. A pale pumpkin rests in the crook of one sage-green mitten, and the other holds a lantern with its candle burning. Even the support between his boots belongs to the scene, with a bare tree against a low golden moon at the front and rough bark at the back. A few leaves in red and amber have settled on his wheat-colored hood.

Collectors know Father Christmas in red and in snow. This piece gives him the chapter that comes first, when the year’s work is gathered in and the evenings begin to close. Because he is painted fully in the round, he belongs where he can be turned and seen from every side, and he lets a Christmas collection begin in autumn, with Santa already on his way.