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Museum,
McGill University,
Montreal Notes on the Relationship of
Photography and Painting in Canada, 1860-1900
by Ann Thomas
Pages 1 | 2
| 3 | 4
To this point we have
considered only those ways in which photography had a direct, and
manually technical, contact with painting. Hawksett, for example,
appears to be asserting the superiority or desirability of painting
over photography, while in fact subverting both. Fraser, on the
other hand, seems to have been experimenting with a discrete blend
which gave both their due. But there was another way in which
photography did service to painting and profoundly influenced it -
as
a source of pictorial information. The painter Robert Harris
(1849-1919) was only one of many who used the photograph as an aide-mémoire.
In a letter relating to his proposed portrait of Lieutenant-Governor Joseph Howe
- a letter typical of many to his relatives and
to friends and relatives of sitters - Harris said, "I only want
the head and shoulders. Find out from some of his friends what
is the best picture of him. I suppose Notman is sure to have photos.
Then I want the following particulars. What was the colour of his
hair? His eyes? General complexion ruddy or pale? Sallow? Dry?
Fresh?" (10) The painting of Sir Hugh Allan shown here (fig. 5)
is in fact an allusion to a photograph (fig. 6), not an imitation.
Certain differences between photograph and painting - additions and
omissions - show that Harris was interested in getting an exact
facial likeness, and little else. Though Harris was a
representationalist, he was no slave to the taste of his age: "I
cannot," he said in a letter to his mother, "please
sitters who want portraits that look like photographs." (11)
Portrait-painters were not the only artists who used photographs for
pictorial information. Landscape-painters like George A. Reid
(1860-1947) also relied on the new medium. Reid had been a student
at the Central Ontario School of Art when Harris was teaching there
and later, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, became a pupil of the
American painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), who himself used
photographs as an aid to painting and probably encouraged at least
some of his students to do likewise. Reid, in fact, noted beside one
of the studies in his personal scrapbook: "Study for logging
made in Paris in 1889, after 52 years was finished with the aid of
photographs." (12) It is possible that Reid used photographs he
himself had taken; there is evidence in his scrap-book that he was a
photographer.*
*It should be said that the interrelation between photography and
painting was not at all one-way. The painter John Hammond
(1843-1939), who was assistant to the Notman photographer Benjamin
Baltzly (act. 1868-1871) on the C. P. R. and Geological Survey
Expedition in 1871, was certainly there to make pencil sketches
but possibly there to advise what views should be photographed. The
American painter Albert Bierstadt is known to have exercised a
similar role vis-a-vis his brothers Charles and Edward who were
photographers. (14)
The American Thomas Eakin's use of photographs could well have
influenced another of his Canadian pupils, the painter Paul Peel
(1860-1892). (13) In Peel's The Painter's Palette (fig. 4), now
in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, an illusionistic
reference to an actual photograph shows the aesthetic experience of
photography expressed in painting. The cabinet portrait (showing a
woman who was probably a personality in the theatre of the time)
bears the name of a photographer well-known in France, Adolphe Braun
(1811-1877). Peel's Portrait of a Young Boy (fig. 7), in
the London, Ontario, Public Library and Art Museum, suggests a
reliance on the style and pictorial information of a photograph we
have of a young boy with Peel in Peel's studio in Paris (fig. 8).
The pose has been slightly altered in the translation, but the
alteration would have been a matter simply of studying the back
of the print or of studying the negative in front of a light source.
The position of the arms has, of course been changed. (15)
The use of several source-photographs as information for a single
painted composition was common. G. Home Russell (1861-1933), for
example, was a master of this technique. Russell was employed by
Notman as a painter of studio backdrops and backgrounds for
composites. His painting Mounts Fox, Dawson, and Donkin, from
Asulkan Glacier (see fig. 9) is derived from two Notman
photographs (figs. 10 and II). James L. Weston (c. 1815-1896),
another of Notman's employees, like Russell, relied on photographs
in a literal way for pictorial information, but perhaps more
slavishly. His Charlottetown, P. E. I. (see fig. 12) is a good
example of this reliance (obvious in the unpainterly way
background is as detailed as foreground) and is probably based on
a combination of at least two photographs, only one of which (fig.
13), yielding the foreground, has come to our attention. The present
location of Russell's Mounts Fox, Dawson and Donkin, from Asulkan Glacier and Weston's Charlottetown,
P. E. I. is unknown. It
may well be that both these paintings could have been made
solely for the purpose of photographic reproduction.*
*Book-illustration, in Canada as elsewhere, was a major outlet for
works of photographic provenance. R. Y. Rind (1823-1906), the
Canadian naturalist, explorer, and prospector, had
chromoxylographs based on the photographs of the surveyor and
photographer Humphrey L. Rime (1833-1903) as illustrations in his Canadian
Red River and Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Expedition (1860).
(Rime accompanied Rind on this expedition in 1857.) The colour
illustrations in the books - The Prairie Looking West, Susan - A
Swampy-Cree Half-breed, Wigwam, an Ojibway Half-breed, Ojibway Squaw
and Papoose, and Freighter's Boat (the source for which
yielded a painted lantern-slide as well) - contrast sharply with their
sources. Invariably the powerful spatial and tonal qualities of
Rime's photographs were lost in the translation.
I am grateful to Mr Richard Ruyda, Curator in the Picture Division
of the Public Archives of Canada, for information relating to the
life and work of Humphrey L. Hime. Mr Huyda's work on Hime is soon
to be published.
Another Notman photograph, Mammoth Spruce Tree, Stanley Park (fig.
14), provided G. Horne Russell with a source of inspiration. A
painted photograph, Spruce Tree, Stanley Park (fig. 15),
shows slight alteration of the original image, with the more vertical tree to the immediate right of the large trunk having been
excluded in the painted version and the tree-trunk itself made
wider. The mysterious figure of the man seated beneath the trees at
the lower left of the original photograph has been replaced by the
figures of a man and woman much smaller in scale. A photograph of
this painted photograph, attributed to G. Horne Russell, is housed
in the Notman Photographic Archives.
J. Henry Sandham (1842-1910), another of the artists employed by
Notman, transferred the techniques of his commercial work into his
leisure-time painting more consistently than any of his colleagues.
The qualities of light and space peculiar to the sort of composite
photograph he made are evident in his paintings Snowshoeing and Tobogganing Winter Scene in Montreal.
Evident also is a
similarity of subject matter. The composite photograph Skating
Carnival has not yet been found, but a photograph of it (fig.
16) and a painting of it (fig. 17) are both in the McCord Museum in
Montreal, the former in the Notman photographic Archives. The
painted copy, by Sandham and Edward Sharpe (act. 1870), a
fellow-worker of Sand ham's, shows a remarkable fidelity to its
source - composite and bears no evidence of a layer of paper (Hawksett's
procedure, mentioned .previously) on canvas or grid-lines
(indicating a photograph squared up like a drawing).
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