“Mortgaging the Homestead,” 1890, by George Agnew Reid.
Another great narrative painting about life in Canada in the nineteenth century.
A perfect composition charged with pathos, with so many stories within the story.
The forlorn grandparents must have been the homesteaders, and can’t believe that a life of hard work has come to this. The father sits humiliated. But the mother gazes intensely at the viewer with sad determination as she’s holding the next generation.
The painting is based on a traumatic childhood experience of the artist, whose parents had to mortgage their homestead farm when he was a child.
This painting a stir during the 1891 federal election campaign, with the Liberals using it as propaganda to criticism the Tories’ National Policy.
(Part of the National Gallery of Art collection)
#CanadianArt
One of my favourite Canadian paintings.
A Meeting of the School Trustees, 1885, by Canadian painter Robert Harris (1849-1919,) part of the @natgallerycan collection.
The tension between the teacher and the trustees in a rural Prince Edward Island school room is palpable. She is trying to persuade them of something, and they look almost intimated by this confident young woman. Perhaps the trustees themselves aren’t entirely literate, and feel a little sheepish giving direction to the local teacher?
IMO the most sublime installation in any Canadian cultural institution: the “Forty Part Motet” recording of Thomas Tallis’ painfully beautiful Spem in Alium, at the National Gallery of Art’s Rideau Chapel. A minor miracle that both the chapel and the motet, wonderful reflections of Canada’s religious patrimony, have so far survived the cultural vandals of our time.
Blessed Good Friday to Christians commemorating this as a day of sacrificial love, of despair that on Sunday turns to hope.
(Image from Alberta born artist William Kurelek’s Passion series, on permanent display at the Niagara Falls Art Gallery.)
Back to my art series with Ash Wednesday by German romantic painter Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885.)
A brilliant allegory of the end of Carnival / Mardi Gras, and the beginning of Lent.
The Mardi Gras clown seems to be in a cell, one imagines having been a little too celebratory the night before. Now he is forced into silent contemplation and fasting, with only a jug of water, as a shaft of morning light represents grace (as it typically does is sacred scripture.)
The Clown represents the foolishness of worldly distractions, and the barrenness of his surroundings the sobriety and quietness of Lent calling him back to contemplate higher things.
Man with Bandage, 1968, by the brilliant Vancouver photographer Fred Herzog (1930-2019.)
Herzog was a pioneer in the use of colour photography, and a genius in capturing quixotic moments in daily life, mainly on the streets of Vancouver. #canadianart #vancouver
“Self Portrait” (1973) by Norval Morrisseau (1932-1907,) acrylic on board.
Morrisseau was a central figure in modern Canadian indigenous art, a key member of the “Indian Group of Seven.”
He was inspired by motifs from ancient petroglyphs found in central Ontario to create his own artistic language for indigenous myths and symbols.
Morrisseau’s lifelong struggle with addiction is depicted in this Self Portrait. A recent Cowley Abbott auction catalogue says of the painting:
“In Self Portrait, the artist is painted with five serpents surrounding his head and chest. Lister Sinclair and Jack Pollock discuss in The Art of Norval Morrisseau (1979) that according to Ojibway legend, the number five frequently represents the primordial senses of man, the serpents can be seen as representing the duality between good and evil. Confronted by these serpents on each side of him, Morrisseau depicts the battles he had been internally grappling with since his youth.”
I don’t know if it was a direct inspiration for Morrisseau’s 1973 Self Portrait, but for me it clearly evokes the Ancient Greek statue the Laocoon, which has been called “the prototypical icon of human agony.”
The Mountain, 1933, oil on canvass by Emily Carr (1871-1945.)
Like so much of Carr’s work, this painting takes your breathe away. Her mountain appears to be a living colossus. As with many of her paintings, she contrasts the enormity and power of nature with contingent, fragile human settlement, eliciting a sense of awe.
Carr wrote that “”Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it. Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist; it is the soul of the individual that counts.”
#CanadianSublime #CanadianArt
Portrait of Sir John A. Macdonald by Henry Sandham (1842-1910.)
Happy Sir John A. Macdonald Day!
As his biographer Richard Gwyn said, “No Macdonald, no Canada.”
Parliament commissioned this portrait of Macdonald to mark his 75th birthday in 1890, the last year of his life. It hangs in the foyer of the House of Commons, and was the first instalment in the collection of Prime Ministerial portraits.
In it the Old Chieftain looks resplendent in the Imperial Privy Council Court uniform, with the regalia of the prestigious Order of the Bath. It symbolizes his monumental achievements, and the enormous respect he held as a statesman.
As his successor Sir Wilfrid Laurier said of Macdonald upon his death:
“Sir John Macdonald now belongs to the ages, and it can be said with certainty, that the career which has just been closed is one of the most remarkable careers of this century ... As to his statesmanship, it is written in the history of Canada. It may be said without any exaggeration whatever, that the life of Sir John Macdonald, from the date he entered Parliament, is the history of Canada.”
In honour of the brave Iranian people, some examples of the magnificent patrimony of Persian art.
These pieces are from the fantastic Ancient West Asian Art galleries of the @metmuseum . Dating back to the Achaemenid Empire (559 BC - 331 BC,) they’re a reminder that Persian civilization is one of the oldest in human history, with centuries of cultural sophistication and complexity that the Islamic Republic of Iran has tried unsuccessfully to suppress.
Left to right:
Gold vessel in the form of a leonine creature, 6th century BC
Fluted gold bowl, 6th Century BC
Wine Drinking in a Spring Garden, water colour and gold on silk, circa 1430 AD
Illuminated manuscript, Anthology of Persian Poetry, 15th Century AD (Ink, opaque watercolor, silver, and gold)
“Mummer Family at the Door,” by David Blackwood (1941-2022.)
This spectral image from a 1985 aquatint etching recalls the ancient mummer tradition brought to outport Newfoundland fishing villages by English pioneers centuries ago.
Townspeople dress in disguise and, during holidays like Christmas, go door to door visiting neighbours where they’re welcomed for songs & revelry.
Blackwood did a series of prints on mummers, part of his lifelong project of preserving the memory of rural Newfoundland customs through his art.
Typical of Blackwood, this image places a colourful aspect of rural life in a numinous, almost ghost like setting. The family appears to be floating, perhaps visiting the viewer from the past. The door features prominently, often used by Blackwood as a symbolic portal between the spiritual and the material, the past and present. The full moon glimmering off the Atlantic is echoed in the doormat, which is an image of the Blackwood family’s fishing vessel, the Flora S. Nickerson.
All of this reflects Blackwood’s devotion to his ancestors who overcame great adversity to sustain vital outport communities for generations, like his native Wesleyville.
The Newfoundland mummer tradition had largely died out by the time Blackwood etched these prints, but happily there has been a recent revival, perhaps inspired in part by his work.
Four icons of the Nativity from four of the traditions celebrating Christmas today according to the Julian Calendar: Ethiopian, Serbian, Assyrian, and Armenian.
Each of the Eastern, Apostolic, and Orthodox Churches have unique ritual cultures, reflected in the vernacular styles of their iconography.
Icons are not properly considered works of art, but of veneration. For believers, they are windows into eternity, making the invisible visible.
To all of those celebrating the Feast of the Nativity and Theophany: Happy Christmas!
