Due to financial difficulties, the family decided to emigrate to Canada, and landed in Quebec City in 1909.

[3] Conditions on the prairies in the early days were brutally demanding, and after some time Richard's father gave up farming.

[4] René Richard helped his father in the store as a teenager, and made trips into the bush to trap furs.

That summer he helped Gagnon make an inventory of the work of Horatio Walker, a painter who had recently died, on the Île d'Orléans near Quebec City.

Richard was laid off and returned to Baie-Saint-Paul where the Cimons gave him a place to stay in exchange for doing odd jobs.

His first exhibition at L'Art français gallery in Montreal was a great success, and his reputation began to grow.

In 1948, Richard joined a McGill University-Canadian Museum of Nature expedition to Quebec's Ungava Peninsula.

[6] When Queen Elizabeth II visited Canada in 1959 she was given one of Richard's paintings by the mayor of Chicoutimi.

The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec held a solo exhibition of his work in 1967, and a retrospective ten years later.

[2] Unlike other Canadian landscapes, Richard's pictures often included trappers, hunters and the Inuit and First Nations people who lived in the north country, with their homes and sled dogs.

One of his works showing the Northwest Territories was used by Canada Post in a series of stamps on Canadian Art.