History in Their Blood: The Indian Portraits of Nicholas de Grandmaison

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

In 1923 a cantankerous Russian artist, Nicholas de Grandmaison, arrived in Canada. Before long, he had made it his mission to paint the Indian people of the West, the “pure” Indians, those with no strain of European blood, as no one had ever done before.

Collected here are 64 of de Grandmaison’s magnificent portraits, selected from the Bank of Montreal collection — some of the most hauntingly proud and defiant faces ever captured by any artist, with brief notes telling a little of the subject’s background.

A brief, extremely readable biography of the artist himself reveals a talented eccentric, difficult to deal with, yet likeable enough that his many friends endured much for the pleasure of his company and in recognition of his enormous talent.

The Indians de Grandmaison painted were not the untrammeled prairie dwellers of his imagination. The days of that lost way of life had passed into history long before he came upon the scene. But the faces, surely, had not changed since the Great Days — they have greatness and power. Nicholas de Grandmaison preferred to paint older people, those who had lived and suffered, whose faces held meaning. This memorable collection of portraits from Canada’s proudest past is proof that such faces have a strength and beauty mere youth cannot match.