A Place in History: Twenty Years of Acquiring Paintings, Drawings and Prints at the National Archives of Canada

Patricia Vervoort is an assistant professor of art history at Lakehead
University.

This book records 25 years of acquisitions of paintings, drawings, and
prints at the National Archives of Canada. The National Archives
collects art works because “realistically produced art is seen to have
an underlying value touching the opinions and desires of its
generation.” This purpose encompasses a wide range of artifacts, from
drawings and paintings to photographs, caricatures, and logos. Further,
the aim to preserve a visual record for each age allows for an immense
range of material, from Angelica Kauffmann’s oil painting Woman in
Eskimo Clothing from Labrador (ca. 1768–1772) to Andy Warhol’s
serigraph Wayne Gretzky, No. 99 (1983). The catalogue is divided into
four parts: The First Peoples, Artists in a New Land, Timeless Mementos,
and Our Times. Twelve color plates and place and name indexes complete
the volume.

“The First Peoples” section includes paintings and drawings that
record the Native way of life in the 18th and 19th centuries. Included
here, in illustration and text, are works by Kauffmann, Rockwell, Hind,
Kane, Rindisbacher, Spilsbury, Hopkins, von Steiger, Richardson, and Sir
Henry Wentworth Acland. The texts explain in detail the historical
circumstances that led to contact between the artist and the image, as
well as biographical details of the subjects and artists. “A Place in
History: Artists in a New Land” groups together landscape paintings
and drawings of the 18th and 19th centuries. Thomas Richardson, Jr., for
example, was a professional English artist who “improved” for
publication the amateur landscapes of Henry James Warre, such as Lake of
the Woods, British North America (1848), shown here. While the archives
has acquired this watercolor, Warre’s original is lost. To illustrate
this common artistic practice of the 19th century, the catalogue
includes illustrations of both Warre’s and Richardson’s views of the
Falls of the Kaministakwia River.

“Timeless Mementos” concerns portraits from the British colonial
period, such as the portrait of novelist Frances Brooke (ca. 1771) by
Catherine Read. “Our Times: Art as Record in the 20th Century”
costitutes the most varied section of the catalogue, with photographs,
posters, and editorial cartoons, as well as paintings and drawings.
Included here are such varied aspects of Canadian life as Andrew
Loomis’s depictions of the Dionne Quintuplets, Harold Pearle’s
posters for Canada Steamships, and Bob Chambers’s cartoons of C.D.
Howe and the Pipeline Issue—The Laocoon Group (1956). This
well-illustrated catalogue is not only a mine of information about
Canadian history but also a visual record of daily life; it shares the
National Archives collection with every reader.