Journal of Canadian Art History / Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien

Over the years I have researched various portrait photographs by William Notman (1826–1891) held by the Notman Photographic Archives at the McCord Museum of Canadian History. This led to an enquiry into his publishing ventures and the marketing of photography. The first of his four publications was Photographic Selections, a portfolio published by the Montreal printer John Lovell in 1863 for approximately 360 subscribers. It was also the first art history book printed in Canada. The selection of forty-seven plates included two of his own landscape images, Fort Chambly, near Montreal, qc , 1863 and Road Side, Lake of Two Mountains, as well as ten photographic copies of engravings after Renaissance and Baroque paintings and twenty-seven photographs of pictures by contemporary British, French and American artists, some of which came from local collectors. The remaining eight images of recent British and North American paintings in Montreal collections were originally photographed by Notman.

The narrative's details are specific to a time and place, but its structure is old and clichéd: a variation on a biographical conceit common since at least the time of Vasari. A young man in a backwater village longs to be an artist but the circumstances are unfavourable. His father dies of typhus when he is only six years old, leaving a widow with five young children and a failing business. His formal education is rudimentary. The village schoolmaster reprimands him for drawing caricatures in his school notebook. He abandons the classroom at the age of eleven to take on a series of manual labour jobs.

When James Wilson Morrice travelled to Venice during the last years of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, he gave much of his time and attention to the areas around the Rialto Bridge and the Piazza San Marco. This is hardly surprising as the two sites were the most famous Venetian monuments, even to those who had never seen the city. In the late nineteenth century, Venice was undergoing renewed celebrity as travel tourism increased, catering to the enormous numbers of people who were seduced by the plethora of publications, photographs, and postcards that lured more and more visitors to the city. The Rialto represented the commercial heart of Venice while San Marco symbolized the authority of the Venetian republic; both had attracted travelers and tourists for over a thousand years and Morrice was no exception. Certainly, he drew and painted various other sites: near the Public Gardens at the eastern end of the city, close to the church of San Trovaso to the south, and around Campo Santi Apostoli toward the northwest. But their numbers are slim in comparison to his images of the two places that had defined Venice in fact and legend since the city's official founding in 421. The material and topographical configuration of San Marco and Rialto allowed Morrice to construct and experiment with what could be considered his archetypal image of urban Venice: an open foreground of water or forecourt of pavement against a pierced wall of buildings disposed within a carefully contained rectilinear space in a gentle grid-like composition. That said, this text will look at one painting of the Rialto that largely contradicts Morrice's more familiar images of the City of Saint Mark.

Durant la décennie 1935–45, le peintre Louis Muhlstock (1904–2001) aborde une série de tableaux ayant pour sujet les quartiers pauvres du centre-ville de Montréal qui lui sont déjà familiers. Né en 1904, à Narajov, Galicie, Louis Muhlstock et sa famille vont rejoindre le père à Montréal en 1911, lors d'une des plus importantes vagues d'immigrants juifs venus de l'Europe centrale et orientale au Québec. Après un séjour de trois ans à Paris, de 1928 à 1931, où il a poursuivi sa formation artistique, le jeune artiste s'est de nouveau intégré à sa collectivité et il travaille à partir des réalités de son époque. Il installe son chevalet dans les ruelles Grubert et Leduc, grouillantes de vie durant son enfance, mais presque désertées dans ces années de crise économique. Pour expliquer ce choix, Muhlstock dira : « These subjects were the areas that I know best, places I remembered from childhood, lanes as yet unpaved and badly neglected ».

Le phénomène des acquisitions massives par les musées est un sujet qui m'intéresse depuis l'acquisition de la collection Lavalin par le Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MACM) en 1992. Ce mode d'acquisition sert de cadre de référence pour cet article afin d'examiner la constitution du discours de l'histoire de l'art tel que formulé par le musée. Comment les professionnels actifs dans un milieu muséologique contribuent-ils aux propositions interprétatives de l'art ? De quelle façon leur contribution rejoint-elle celle formulée dans le milieu académique ? Le parallélisme entre le développement des musées et la professionnalisation de la discipline de l'histoire de l'art au Québec, au milieu des années 1960, suggère que cette piste est fertile et que, réciproquement, les historiens et les conservateurs ont contribué à échafauder une histoire commune autour des artistes qui deviendront les figures mythiques de l'art au Québec.

Anyone interested in the history of New France, Jesuit missions, seventeenth-century natural history, the natural history and ethnology of early Canada and, not least of all, Canadian art, should rejoice at the publication, at long last, of Louis Nicolas' Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas. Indeed, it should be a double celebration since McGill-Queen's University Press has issued a magnificent edition with a superbly edited text accompanied by excellent reproductions of Louis Nicolas' beautiful drawings, all printed on fine paper.