Canadian Art

I

Introduction

Canadian Art, the visual arts, chiefly painting and sculpture, created in Canada from the time of European settlement in the 1600s until the present. The history of Canadian art parallels the growth of the country from its beginnings as a colony, first of France and then of Britain, until its emergence as a modern nation in the 20th century. Because of Canada’s great size and cultural diversity, the art of each region of the nation has evolved differently. Nevertheless, artists and art institutions across the country have a shared goal: to express the Canadian experience through art.

The major centers of art activity in Canada have been Toronto, Ontario; Montréal, Québec; and Vancouver, British Columbia. Other cities—notably Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Halifax, Nova Scotia—have developed important visual arts communities as well, creating an informal national network of exhibition sites. In recent years especially, indigenous artists have assumed their rightful place in the history of Canadian art.

A primary theme running through Canadian art is the Canadian landscape, or perhaps more accurately, the response of artists to the environment around them. The term landscape also encompasses images of the city, as both the urban and the rural are ever-present visual references in Canadian art. The human figure is another major theme in Canadian art, both in the traditional form of the portrait and in contemporary references to the body. Still-life once held only minor interest for Canadian artists, but today this category includes images of individual objects from both the natural and the constructed world.

As a young country, Canada drew on outside artistic traditions, especially those of France and Britain. From the early 19th century on, the United States influenced Canadian visual arts because of geographic proximity and strong political and economic ties between the two nations. As Canadian artists sought a place in the global art community in the 20th century, European and non-Western images also took on significant importance for them. Painting dominated Canadian visual art until the late 20th century, when sculpture and installations—large, three-dimensional artworks in various media—became pervasive, and technology—especially photography and video—took an ever-growing role in defining Canadian culture.

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Although indigenous artists produced the first art works in what is now Canada, their achievements lie beyond the scope of this article, which discusses Canadian art from the time of European settlement. For information on indigenous art in Canada, see Inuit and Native American Art. See also Folk Art.

II

Art in New France and Early British North America

The earliest paintings by Europeans in Canada were made by Roman Catholic clerics sent to administer New France (now Québec) and by British military personnel who later took over the administration of colonial territory in Canada. French explorers established a trading post at the site of Québec City in 1608, but French colonists did not begin to settle the region for another 20 years. Other French settlements were established later in Montréal and in Acadia (now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island). French rule in Canada lasted until 1759.

A

Painting and Sculpture in New France

The primary pictorial record of French settlement during this period comes from portraits of local officials and clergy, as well as images of nuns. The largely self-taught artists who painted these simple works had little interest in painting the landscape. Churches requested portraits of clerics. Portraits of much-loved nuns were typically painted as memorials, after the nun’s death, for their families or their religious orders. Other religious images and ex-voto (devotional) pictures depicted saints miraculously intervening to protect the settlers from the unexpected difficulties of everyday life in their new country. One of the few professional painters to visit New France was Claude François, who became known as Frère Luc after he joined a religious order. Frère Luc created large religious images, including an Assumption (1671, Hôpital Général, Québec), during his short stay in Québec City.

Sculptors in New France decorated churches and seminaries with gilded wooden altars in imitation of earlier European styles. These early sculptors included the Baillairgé family in Québec, Louis Quévillon in Montréal, and the Levasseur brothers, who created an altar screen for the Ursuline Chapel in Québec City in the 1730s.

B

Early Art in the British Colonies

France and Britain were frequently at war in the 1700s, and their conflicts spread to their North American colonies. Following the British conquest of New France by 1760, British military officers stationed in Québec and in eastern Canada produced the first landscape paintings in Canada. These officers had been trained to draw maps and create precise and accurate drawings of topography (land features), and during their leisure time they produced watercolor views of nature. Thomas Davies, George Heriot, and James Pattison Cockburn, for example, documented rushing rivers and waterfalls in carefully detailed, although often-romanticized, images during the late 1700s and early 1800s. At the same time, amateur artists also painted watercolors of local life and landscape. Many of the views by the British military artists were reproduced in England as colored engravings, thus becoming the first “postcards” from Canada.

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