Canada

Canada’s visual history in antique prints begins with the first European attempts to record and communicate the character of a territory whose scale, geographic variety and indigenous cultures presented illustrators with challenges quite unlike those of any European subject. From the earliest engraved maps and views of New France produced by Champlain and his contemporaries in the early seventeenth century to the documentary illustration of the Victorian illustrated press, the prints depicting Canada reflect the progressive European encounter with a continent of extraordinary geographic and human diversity.

The St Lawrence River valley — the entry point and commercial spine of New France — attracted the earliest and most concentrated illustrative attention. Quebec City, founded by Champlain in 1608 on its dramatic promontory above the river, was depicted in views and plans from the seventeenth century onwards that document both the physical character of one of North America’s most naturally spectacular urban sites and the successive phases of its architectural and urban development. The siege and capture of Quebec by Wolfe’s forces in 1759 — one of the decisive military events of the eighteenth century — generated an extraordinary body of illustrative material, including the celebrated paintings of Wolfe’s death at the moment of victory that became among the most widely reproduced images of the century.

The Maritime provinces — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland — attracted illustrative attention from the seventeenth century onwards, both for their strategic importance as the Atlantic gateway to the continent and for the distinctive character of their landscapes, fisheries and communities. The cod fisheries of Newfoundland, worked by European fishermen from the sixteenth century and generating enormous commercial wealth, appear in prints that document both the fishing operations themselves and the physical character of the Newfoundland coast with considerable specificity.

The expansion of settlement westward through the nineteenth century opened new subjects for illustrators: the Great Lakes, the Ontario and Quebec hinterland, the prairies of the Red River settlement and eventually the Pacific coast and British Columbia. The construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway — completed in 1885 and one of the great engineering achievements of the nineteenth century — generated extensive illustrative coverage that brought the landscapes of the Canadian interior and the Rocky Mountains to European and eastern Canadian audiences for the first time. These railway illustrations are primary documents of the opening of the Canadian west, combining engineering documentation with landscape imagery of considerable visual drama.

Indigenous peoples of Canada appear in antique prints from the earliest European contact, depicted by artists whose understanding of the communities they documented ranged from sympathetic observation to the projection of European expectations and fantasies onto unfamiliar subjects. The work of Paul Kane, whose paintings of indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest were widely engraved and distributed in the 1850s and 1860s, constitutes the most significant body of documentary indigenous imagery in Canadian antique prints, and the prints made from his paintings are among the most historically important in the entire Canadian tradition.

For collectors of North American history, exploration narrative or the visual culture of the British Empire, antique prints of Canada offer material of considerable variety and genuine historical significance. The combination of dramatic landscape, colonial history, military narrative and indigenous culture gives Canadian illustration an unusual breadth, and significant original examples from the major illustrative traditions are increasingly scarce.