Bernard Doucet really didn’t want to snare rabbits with his father.

He was nine years old, and his dad hunted and fished to fill the deep freezer and feed a family of nine. One morning, he told his son they were going hunting. Doucet’s uncle from Alberta was visiting them in their home on the Lower West Side of Saint John. He sensed his nephew’s lack of interest and told Doucet’s father he was taking the boy to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton that day.

Doucet, an Acadian who spent his summers as a kid in Cap-Lumière on New Brunswick’s coast just south of Kouchibouguac National Park, had never heard of the Beaverbrook. But off he went and spent the day with his uncle, a “pretty learned, interesting guy,” says Doucet.

Salvador Dali’s “Santiago El Grande,” a signature piece in the gallery’s permanent collection, captivated them. The pair spent time studying the enormous, surrealist masterpiece; his uncle was a Catholic priest, so was compelled by the religious theme of the piece, and the young Doucet was “mesmerized by it … I don’t know that I had ever seen real art.”

It was an overwhelming moment, he recalls. “I loved it from that point onward. Not just the institution, but the notion of making beautiful things, or challenging things, or provocative things.”

More than 40 years later, Doucet is back at the Beaverbrook, this time as executive director after building a career in arts promotion and philanthropy in Ontario and Nova Scotia. At the heart of his work is fostering a dynamic visitor experience, is fostering a dynamic visitor experience, so during my visit to the gallery, he was keen to have me lie down on the floor and look up at the Dali, my feet pressed against the wall. Longtime tour guide Gerry Rymes, known for his lively presentations on the Dali collection, enthusiastically described the elements of the painting that was originally intended to hang above an altar in a Spanish cathedral, hence the value of studying it from ground level.

“What is the evidence that people really engage with art? Well, they lay on their backs and they leave their footprints on the wall,” says Doucet. “That really just makes me happy.”

Doucet has never seen himself as a “maker” but has been passionate about arts and culture since that visit to the Beaverbrook as a kid. He didn’t pursue a career in the field right away; instead, he did an undergraduate degree in German studies at McMaster University and then worked for a few years as a legislative assistant. He also did an MBA at Dalhousie University and worked in the financial sector.

All the while, he felt the urge to build a career in the arts. He took the leap with a job at Toronto-based marketing and public-relations firm A&C that combined his finance skills with his passion for culture. He led key accounts with the Toronto International Art Fair (now Arts Toronto) and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

After three years with A&C, Doucet returned to Atlantic Canada to become director of institutional advancement with the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS), where he led revenue generation and public engagement strategies. There, he met Sarah Moore Fillmore, now CEO of AGNS. Back then, she was chief curator, and marvelled at his passion for creating experiences for gallery customers, patrons, and artists.

“I just immediately fell in love with him. He was just a perfect partner. His care for art and artists was really apparent. He understood the role of an art museum and how to create some excitement and some glamour and some needed sparkle,” says Moore Fillmore, who also worked with Doucet when he became executive director of the Sobey Family Philanthropic Foundations in 2013, a position he held until he joined the Beaverbrook last fall. Until 2015, Moore Fillmore was the curator of the Sobey Art Award in addition to her duties as the chief curator of the AGNS.

Moore Fillmore calls Doucet the “prince of parties” for the openings and fundraisers he’s organized over the years, and for formal and informal get-togethers for visitors, patrons, and artists from across Canada. Shortly after he joined AGNS, he organized a dinner on site for patrons, celebrating a retrospective of works by Quebec artist Jacques Hurtubise, who died in Cape Breton in 2014. This kind of event hadn’t happened in the gallery before.

“He immediately started thinking about our fundraising events as bigger and better and more exciting. It was exhilarating to see him (apply) his talents. He threw really great parties,” says Moore Fillmore.

Doucet has always looked for creative ways to expand the art community. In 2011, he recruited artist, educator, and curator Eleanor King to stage a “young patrons” event at a boxing club in Halifax. “It was a way of bringing in a new generation of collectors, a new generation of patrons to the (AGNS),” says King, who now works in New York with the Pratt Institute and is an artist who has made the longlist and shortlist several times for the Sobey Art Award, which Doucet promoted in his role with the Sobey Family Philanthropic Foundations.

King, who has an interdisciplinary art practice that includes painting, video, sound, and sculptural installation, says Doucet is critical to the growth of the arts in Atlantic Canada. She adds the sector needs people like him who are “a bridge between who’s got the money and who’s making the art.”

For decades, Doucet has viewed the arts through an economic lens to make it more viable for artists and institutions like galleries and museums. Though not an artist himself, he has been “in awe” of them, going back to that first Beaverbrook visit and has always believed their work has economic value that should be realized. “There’s a real difference in the economic system of how professional artists are treated versus most other professions, so I was always curious about that question,” he says. King herself remembers Doucet once asking, “Why doesn’t an artist make as much as a lawyer?”

In his ongoing efforts to promote the work of artists, Doucet finds inspiration in Lord Beaverbrook himself, who sponsored a competition for young artists in the Daily Express newspaper in London, U.K., in 1955. Lucien Freud’s famous painting “Hotel Bedroom” finished second in that competition and is on display as part of the permanent collection at the Beaverbrook.

“I spent 15 years with the Sobey Art Award in Canada working with emerging and practising contemporary artists. We always referenced it as the Canadian version of the Turner Prize, (which) came after the Daily Express prize,” says Doucet, “so all things can be connected if you look for the right points.”

Doucet’s career journey meets at the intersection between the arts and business, so he’s also found inspiration through his connection to the Sobey family and the second-largest grocery retailer in the country. It instilled a customer-service approach that he brings to the Beaverbrook as he seeks to make the collections and rotating exhibitions more inclusive and attract people from communities all over the province. He refers to gallery visitors as “customers,” not “guests.”

“When you take a customer-service mentality, it ignites in an institution the awareness that it’s not our job to wait for people to come in; it’s our job to demonstrate our relevance to everyone,” says Doucet, the first Acadian to serve as executive director.

“There are approximately 850,000 New Brunswickers. About 1,000 of them are members of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, so I have 849,000 New Brunswickers to pursue.”

Since he was a kid, the Dali has been Doucet’s favourite work in the gallery; now that he’s back in New Brunswick as the Beaverbrook’s executive director, it still has a special place in his heart but he has a new favourite: Graham Vivian Sutherland’s “Sketch of Beaverbrook.”

“I’m very proud of our namesake. I’m really happy to be home. I feel really connected to being professionally associated with something that was meaningful to me, and (Sutherland’s work) just sort of snuck into my heart a little bit more,” says Doucet.

“It’s not based on art history or aesthetics or any sort of logical, defensible thing other than just pure emotion. I still love the Dali, but I feel a special connection to (the Beaverbrook sketch) because of where I’m at in my own journey right now.”