Prints by Rodolphe Bresdin

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

One small etching (7 and 3/16 x 4 and 5/8) from a master printmaker, often “morbid” if not “perverse,” an etching owned by the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina — and thereby hangs this book. Rudolphe Bresdin (1822-1885) created hundreds of prints with great artistry — genius, some said. He lived in Canada for four years (1873-77), and had no more luck commercially here than in Europe and his native France. Even posthumously his luck is bad. Although he brought approximately 900 prints to Canada for sale, and eked out four years living in Montreal, only two lithographs from that period survive, the one a frontispiece for a journal that was never issued, and the other, an intricate allegory of burgeoning Canada in which the featured bust of Sir Georges Etienne Cartier was subsequently mislabelled Jacques Cartier.

The ill-starred Bresdin’s enigmatic life and work is set forth here (for $17.50) “as part of a continuing research program” whereby the Regina gallery (with Canada Council funds) attempts to place the artwork of its permanent collection into historical context. In a comprehensive 20-page account, provided in French and English, curator Michael Parke-Taylor clarifies bits of the mystery that shroud Bresdin’s life and complicate his finely-wrought multi-layered etchings. The 58 prints (“only in black and white,” as Montrealers of 1875 complained) are borrowed from galleries in Toronto, Ottawa, Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, Washington, and Amsterdam as well as Regina.

The result is a collector’s item in an extra sense; the book could provide clues to hitherto undiscovered lithographs of a nineteenth century master.

As well, the book is a reminder to what heights of unhappiness may rise the lives of the greatly gifted. In a mood of suicidal despair, Bresdin produced the heavily symbolic “La Comedic de la Mont,” drawn, it is now believed, from The Cave of Despair in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. When he thought himself about to escape Europe to the unspoiled regenerative freedom of North America, Bresdin drew from the Holy Family’s biblical exodus to produce the lavishly set “La Fuite en Egypte.” It would be nice to think that the work resting in Regina, “Mon Rêve,” represented Bresdin’s idea of Canada.

But it doesn’t. It’s a “claustrophobic juxtaposition of a marine scene with exotic architectural structures of disparate style and scale plus mysterious allegorical statues.” Of it, as of so much else with Bresdin, “A precise meaning has remained elusive.”