"There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy / They say he wandered very far, very far/ Over land and sea"

Nature Boy — written by eden ahbez and made immortal by Nat King Cole — tells the story of a wandering, enchanted boy who appears briefly and leaves behind a single truth about love. Claude MarQuis spent a career painting people who carry that quality without knowing it.

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The Nature Boy Series (2003) was a solo exhibition at the prestigious Galerie Montcalm in Hull — twenty-three large-scale paintings, eighteen of them 48×48 inches and two monumental 64×64 inch canvases that greeted visitors at the entrance. The models were young men from MarQuis's circle, each transformed through the lens of the song's lyrics into something larger than portrait. Some stand "sad of eye". Some in profile, out in nature, in white tank tops or black, or shirtless. Many are surrounded by the song's lyrics in varying fonts — stencilled, floating, woven into the landscape itself — sometimes disappearing and reappearing as the eye moves across the canvas, echoing the rhythm of the music.

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Throughout the exhibition, the song played on continuous loop — approximately fifty interpretations spanning samba, jazz, pop, and classical, voiced by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Marvin Gaye, Abbey Lincoln, Kurt Elling and many others. The music never stopped. The paintings listened.

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To make room for the show, a major exhibition of works by the late Jean-Paul Riopelle — widely considered Canada's greatest artist — was removed from the walls of Galerie Montcalm.

It was that kind of moment.

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The Ottawa Citizen’s Paul Gessell noted that “young, hip barflies in the ByWard Market have long been mesmerized by the startling portraits created by Gatineau artist Claude MarQuis” — and that after years toiling in the art underground, MarQuis had finally arrived at a prestige gallery in the national capital region.

His headline said it all: “Underground artist sees light.”

Voir critic Suzanne Richard noted that the figures seemed "pétrifiés" — frozen in a singular, defining moment — while the landscapes around them remained gestural and baroque, in deliberate contrast. She described MarQuis as possessing "l'art des sous-entendus" — the art of suggestion — opening each element like an enigma left to the viewer's interpretation.

Ottawa Magazine called it "a critical and popular success" — the culmination of nearly a decade of figurative work that had wound through bars, alternative spaces, and gallery walls across Ottawa and Hull.

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It was also, for a time, a farewell. Shortly after the show closed, MarQuis put down his brushes and turned to the one hundred original songs he had been quietly accumulating since his teenage years in Québec City.

The paintings would wait. The music could not.

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Inspired by "Nature Boy" — written by eden ahbez, made famous by Nat King Cole (1948).