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Early European artists who came to this locale we now call Ottawa seemed to be enchanted with one thing and one thing only: The Chaudière Falls along the Ottawa River.
One by one, in the early 1800s, the artists came, fell in love with the falls, pulled out their paintbrushes and captured the scene for posterity.
Charles Ramus Forrest in the 1820s even painted a memorable, but somewhat fanciful, watercolour of the falls without ever visiting them. The title of this sleight of hand: Chaudière Falls, Ottawa River.
Actually, such a practice was a common occurrence. Forrest’s watercolour was not simply pulled from thin air but inspired by a sketch from his talented contemporary, John Elliott Woolford, who had seen the falls first-hand.
Most of these Chaudière-loving artists back then were associated with Lord Dalhousie, the governor of British North America and the man often considered as “the first major art patron in Canada.” Many gems from his collection are part of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada opening tomorrow (Feb. 15).
Woolford was with Dalhousie when the Scottish lord arrived in Halifax Oct. 25, 1816, initially to become lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia. The promotion to governor for all the British colonies in North America came four years later and lasted until 1828.
Woolford accompanied the governor on many of his travels across what we now call Atlantic and Central Canada. Forrest was Dalhousie’s aide-de-camp, but the married artist’s adulterous affair with a Quebec City woman offended the lord’s sense of morality. Forrest was sent packing, but not before Dalhousie scooped up some of the artist’s handiwork.
Luckily for us, Dalhousie was no ordinary blue-blooded prude. He was also an enthusiastic art collector. At one time, he had more than 400 works from his 12 years in Canada.
Most of the Dalhousie collection has been dispersed and sold over the years but the National Gallery has managed to snag some of the most interesting loot and has built its new exhibition of about 140 artworks and artifacts around 17 of the federal institution’s most recent Dalhousie acquisitions.
Lord Dalhousie: Patron and Collector opens Feb. 15 and continues until May 11 before travelling to Halifax, Saint John, N.B., and possibly a stop in British Columbia. The Quebec City area figures most prominently in the artworks. But there are scenes of everything from the East Coast to Niagara Falls.
The show is curated by the National Gallery’s René Villeneuve and includes landscapes, urban scenes, drawings of aboriginal people, fine china, silver goblets and other bric-a-brac that help create a portrait of early 19th-century Canada.
In what we now call Ottawa, Lord Dalhousie did more than lend his name to a commercial street in the Byward Market.
During a visit in 1820, he laid the cornerstone for the first arch of the first bridge to be built across the Ottawa River, linking Upper and Lower Canada. Some artists, in anticipation of the bridge, actually painted it into their canvases before it was built.
Dalhousie was back in 1827 to lay the first foundation stone of the first lock of the Rideau Canal, launching construction of the project. The lord was a pal of canal engineer Col. John By and of the founder of what was once called Hull, Philemon Wright.
The Rideau Canal, the Lachine Canal, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Montreal and other massive public works projects were greatly favoured by Lord Dalhousie. He could not figure out why taxpaying Canadians were not equally enthusiastic about these expensive undertakings.
“The conclusion must be,” he once commented, “that there is no natural disposition to public improvement—they would go on to the end of time, indolent, unambitious, contented and unenterprising.”
Well, when it comes to the Chaudière Falls, it is hard to argue with Dalhousie. Years after the first visits by military artists, the falls have been encircled by a most unappealing collection of industrial buildings, most of which are today either abandoned or crumbling eyesores. The scene is, indeed, suitable only for what Dalhousie called the indolent, unambitious, contented and unenterprising.
Ottawa’s early European visitors knew a good thing when they saw it. The people who actually settled here didn’t. They hid the falls behind industrial blight.
Periodically, there is talk of the National Capital Commission rescuing the falls, returning the area to a park-like setting suitable for family picnics. But it took the NCC half a century to start rebuilding LeBreton Flats after the neighbourhood was razed, so don’t hold your breath waiting for the rehabilitation of the falls.
In the meantime, go see the National Gallery show and enjoy the falls as others did almost 200 years ago.
James Pattison Cockburn did one particularly good watercolour called The Falls of the Ottawa and the Bridges over the Falls in 1823. This work is part of the 17 most recent acquisitions.
“Lt.-Col. Cockburn returned from Ottawa and Rideau yesterday, quite in rapture with them,” Lord Dalhousie wrote in his diary.
What an expression: “quite in rapture.” Has anyone swooned so poetically about the Chaudière Falls lately?