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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
So great is the complexity of
the painting Skating Carnival that it is likely that some
mechanical or photographic copying device was used to produce it.
It seems possible in this case that use of more negatives could be
printed (usually enlarged) on sensitized, canvas. Such a
process - a logical advance over both the camera obscura and
camera
lucida - was very early described in the photographic press. Photographic
News, for example, had reported in 1863 that "M. Disdéri
[French photographer, 1819-1890; a celebrated portraitist]
announced that he has just been negotiating with an American artist
who had found out a means of producing positive pictures on the
prepared canvas employed by painters...[the technique] produces a
work which has all the merit of photographic accuracy, and at the
same time has given [the artist] free scope for his talent." (16)
(A few days later, Photographic News (17) was able to report
that such a process had been patented by a gentleman in Baltimore as
early as 1856. As a matter of fact, a complete set of instructions
had already appeared in 1858 in the American Journal of
Photography.) (18)
If this process was widely used in Canada, painters like Sandham
and Sharpe were probably reluctant to admit it - just as they were
reluctant to admit any use whatever of photography. While the
services photography could render painting were generally
acknowledged, a painter who admitted to taking advantage of them
would have been frowned upon. It is not yet known whether or not
photography was at issue in the minor scandal in Toronto art circles
in the mid-1880s in which the well-known watercolourist Daniel
Fowler (1810-1894) was accused of plagiarism; but Homer Watson
(1855-1936), who had worked in Notman's Toronto studio, defended
Fowler to the dealer James Spooner in terms that would suggest that
such might have been the case:
I do not think that he [probably a mutual acquaintance, as yet
unidentified, who had taken a position against Fowler] holds the
opinion strongly of Fowler copying. It is only that he has not given
the thing a thought; and no doubt he has a print of a subject he saw
of Fowler's or something like it. But what of it? What the devil is
the use of painting anything nowadays, anything is liable to be
photographed or engraved now, so that the dabbler in paint can
gabble, "Hello, here is a photograph of Watson's
subject, he copies!" (19)
In a review of the first exhibition of the Art Students League
in Toronto in March 1872 a critic remarked: "We cannot praise
Mr. Halford too highly for his steady determination in painting from
life instead of adopting, as many do now, the use of the photograph." (20) The painter, William
Sawyer (1820-1889), was quoted
by The Gazette (Montreal) in 1872 as disapproving, for
technical reasons, of the practice of painting over photographs.
"Mr. Sawyer, "remarked a columnist, "does not ignore
photography as a valuable assistant but will not tolerate the use
of it as a foundation for an oil painting...In the case of the
semi-photograph pictures, the paint is thinly laid on with a great
deal of oil and it is a certain consequence that in the course of
time the picture suffers by deterioration." (21)
Whatever the critical and technical case, however, a great many
Canadian painters of note were involved in one way or another with
photography: the painter James Duncan (1806-1881), for example, was
a partner in the firm Young and Duncan in Montreal; William
Raphael (1833-1914) was employed by the photographer A. B. Taber (c.
1832-after 1865) in Montreal after 1863-1864; Otto Jacobi
(1812-1901), Adolphe Vogt (1843-1871), and Charles Way (1835-1919)
were all employed at the Notman studios in Montreal for varying
lengths of time, while Robert Gagen (1848-1926), Horatio Walker
(1858-1938), and Frederick Vemer (1836-1928) were employed at the
Notman studios in Toronto. (22) There are many other Canadian painters
known to have been involved in photography to a greater or lesser
extent, but the details of their involvement are too scanty to
warrant mention here.
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