Montreal, 1914 — Guido Nincheri and his wife Giulia had arrived in Montreal a few months earlier. Feeling homesick yet unable to return home because the First World War was raging in Italy, the artist had secured a few contracts in church decoration, but this wasn’t enough. For some time, he had been able to count on his father’s generosity to help make ends meet, but the money being sent over from Italy was increasingly losing its value due to the armed conflict. The stipend from his father was no longer enough to support the couple, all the more so as Giulia was expecting her first child.

It was therefore with a heart brimming with hope that Guido Nincheri knocked at the door of Henri Perdriau’s stained glass studio. Like Nincheri, Perdriau was an immigrant, an art lover and a devout Catholic. Perhaps he would be sympathetic to the young artist’s plight and give him a little bit of work…