Illustrated News: Juliana Horatia Ewing's Canadian Pictures 1867-1869

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer and the co-author of Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian
Garden Writing.

We owe much of our knowledge of the way Canada looked before the widespread use of photography to the amateur artists, many of them visitors from England, who painted and sketched scenes to send to friends and relatives back home. Juliana Horatia Ewing’s paintings and sketches, which survive in England in Wakefield District Library and in private collections, and in New Brunswick in the Provincial Archives, are one such valuable resource.

Ewing is remembered not as the competent artist she was but as a writer for young people — her mother and sister edited Aunt Judy’s Magazine and her works appeared regularly in it — and as the founder and first president of the Parkinson Society for the Lovers of Hardy Flowers. The publication of this book gives us access to 31 of the New Brunswick watercolors and drawings she produced during a two-year residence in Fredericton with her officer husband. Included are landscapes, streetscapes, architectural interiors and exteriors, a botanical study, portrait and clothing sketches of both native people and settlers, and scenes of travel and daily human activity.

Donna McDonald, a Canadian now residing in London, England, has coupled these visual images with lively information from Ewing’s letters and diaries. She has enhanced the whole by the gentle addition of further research into Ewing’s life and the New Brunswick and the England of Ewing’s lifetime. The text is documented and indexed, making it an excellent reference work as well as a fine evenings entertainment.