Alfred Laliberté was admitted to the Conseil des arts et manufactures at the age of eighteen and won First Prize two years later at the Exposition provinciale de Québec with a statue of his mentor, Sir Wilfrid Laurier. In 1902, he left to study in Paris where he met Marc-Aurèle Suzor-Côté. He returned in 1907, and in 1922, became a teacher at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. Laliberté produced nine hundred bronze, marble and plaster sculptures, favouring monumental representations of national figures, as seen in Louis Hébert, Monument aux Patriotes and Monument à Dollard des Ormeaux. At the same time, he made small bronze works depicting legends, customs and everyday rural and urban activities, such as Les petits baigneurs at the Maisonneuve Public Baths. Toward the end of his life, he wrote three books: Mémoires, Réflexions sur l’art and Les artistes de mon temps.
SEE :
« Melvin Charney : la sculpture et l’écho » by Serge Fisette, ESPACE, vol. 7, no 4, p. 25.
