Posted to Canada: The Watercolours of George Russell Dartnell 1835-1844

Gerald Noonan was Associate Professor of English at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, and co-editor of A Public and Private Voice.

This volume offers evidence that much history is family history. The family of George Russell Dartnell (1800-78), a British Army doctor and accomplished artist who served in Canada from 1835 to 1844, is responsible for preserving most of his watercolours and letters which make possible this visual record of the Canada that was there before cameras came.

Although Honor de Pencier (a research associate at the Royal Ontario Museum who pieces together the evidence) does not declare her position on the family tree, her name is linked with the doctor-artist’s descendants who, along with a number of public institutions, contributed 178 sketches for a 1988 retrospective Dartnell exhibition at the ROM.

In Canada, Dartnell served and sketched at Quebec City, Montreal, London (pop. 2,000), and Penetanguishene. His works include sketches of Niagara Falls, Brock’s Monument, St. Marys, Port Talbot, the village of Coldwater, Matchedash Bay near Barrie, the Maitland River, and the Bayfield Church near Goderich. Dartnell also recorded scenes of his travels with the British Army to Malta, the Greek islands, Gibraltar, Sardinia, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

The story of Dartnell’s life is necessarily, and literally, sketchy as de Pencier gauges the doctor’s attitudes to places, and his preoccupations there, by the number and nature of the sketches that survive. For example, he did five drawings in the winter of 1836 of the massive ice shoves at Montreal, which indicate that “he was obviously fascinated” (p. 32). A loose style indicates a hasty sitting, and rich colour a more luxurious stop. In addition, the subjects of sketches — portraits of officers’ families, snowshoers, Indians, a wagon team — indicate the breadth of Dartnell’s friendships and his interests. Details in the drawings — in the Indian clothing, for example — offer rare evidence of the artifacts and lifestyles of the time.

Of Dartnell’s ten children, a daughter was born in Montreal in 1836, and one in London, Ontario in 1838. The numerous birthplaces, listed only in the appendix, suggest the domestic vicissitudes of military life, and as well suggest that the woman, unsketched and unsung, who bore both the trials and the children, has a story too. Irish-born (as was Dartnell), Anna Maria Bennett of Lifford married the doctor in 1832, had her first child in 1833, her last in 1855, and survived her husband, who died at 78.