LANDSCAPE ART IN CANADA 



THE history of Canadian art is neither complicated nor long. 

 It begins with a number of portrait painters practising the 

 Lawrence tradition in Quebec and the Maritime Provinces in 

 the latter half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, 

 whose activities do not enter into a survey of Canadian landscape paint- 

 ing. The first Canadian landscape painter may be said to have been 

 Paul Kane, who was born at Toronto, then called York, about the year 

 1820. After some travel in Europe Paul Kane centred his interest in 

 the Indian, and disappeared into the Canadian North-West and Hudson's 

 Bay country ; travelling thousands of miles byScanoe, or on horseback 

 or snowshoes, and finally emerging with his many pencil and water- 

 colour sketches from which he painted his great series of portraits and 

 landscapes representing the life of the Indian. Although not possessing 

 any great artistic excellence these pictures are full of painstaking detail 

 and are faithful representations of the places and peoples he saw, and are 

 greatly superior to those of his predecessor, Catlin, whose works hang 

 in Washington, D.C. The finest collection of Paul Kane's pictures is in 

 the Royal Ontario Museum at Toronto. About the same time there 

 were painting landscapes in Eastern Canada Cornelius Kreighoff, who 

 was born at Diisseldorf, and Otto Jacobi, who was born at Kb'nigsburg. 

 Kreighoff has become established as the first painter of the Habitant or 

 French Canadian peasant of Quebec. His pictures, although often anec- 

 dotic and sentimental in their interest, have occasionally considerable 

 artistic merit and are faithful and often amusing transcripts of the lives 

 and customs of bygone Quebec, and are now being increasingly sought 

 after by collectors. Jacobi painted in both oil and water-colour, and 

 excelled most in the latter medium, many of his small sketches being 

 vivid and truthful impressions of the passing seasons. 

 The pioneer landscape painters, Cresswell, Edson, Sandham, Eraser, 

 Fowler, O'Brien, Perre, and others, began to work in both oil and water- 

 colour, rendering admirable service to Canadian Art and, upon the forma- 

 tion of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art in 1880 by the Marquis 

 of Lome, they were elected charter-members and became the back- 

 bone of its early exhibitions as far as landscape was concerned. Canada 

 as a country possesses such a striking individuality that it was inevitable 

 that sooner or later a generation of landscape painters would arise who 

 would see her without let or hindrance from European traditions, con- 

 ventions, or teaching, but this generation was not yet. For a long time 

 after the passing of the pioneers the young Canadian artist of sufficient 

 means and ability went to Europe for his training because no training 

 was available at home ; and in the Paris studios he learnt to paint ac- 

 cording to the conventions then in vogue, and on his return to Canada 

 continued painting according to these conventions ; and there were not 



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