Lord Strathcona, 1901-1902

Artist: Harris, Robert (1849-1919)

Medium: oil over pencil on heavy wove paper

Dimensions: 47.2 X 39.3 cm

Donald Alexander Smith, Lord Strathcona (1820-1914) arrived in Canada from Scotland in 1838 as an employee with the Hudson's Bay Company. He is best known as a founder of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and as the who drove the historic "last spike" marking the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1885. He was also a great philanthropist and art collector, and was raised to the peerage in 1897 as Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal at which time he was also made Canadian high commissioner to Britain. This small painting is by the Montreal society portraitist Robert Harris and is a preliminary study for a much larger portrait made for McGill University.

National Archives of Canada, negative no. C-129773