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CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS
resident in London at the time of World War I. In November 1916 he founded
the Canadian War Memorials Fund, a private charity through which, in the
next three years, more than a hundred artists were hired, a third of them
Canadian and most of the rest British. A very few had been in active service
before being included in the scheme; others were brought into the army in
some capacity, while some remained outside the army structures. Altogether
they produced close to a thousand works of art — drawings, prints, sculptures
and above all canvases, many on a very large scale. The works dealt not only
with the battlefields of Europe, but also with activities on the home front. This
was in fact a Canadian scheme first, and its early success led to its being imi¬
tated by other Allied nations.
When World War II broke out in 1939, there was no immediate decision to
imitate the World War I programme. However, many individuals felt something
similar should be done, in particular Vincent Massey, scion of one of Canada’s
leading families, a well-placed and discriminating art collector, and Canada’s
High Commissioner in London. In his efforts he was aided by the Director of
the National Gallery of Canada, H.O. McCurry, and C.P. Stacey, a Canadian
historian, who had been appointed historical officer to the Canadian Army
after the outbreak of war. Initially reluctant when it came to establishing a
new programme, Prime Minister Mackenzie King finally gave his approval in
1943, and the Canadian War Records initiative was set up. This differed from
the Canadian War Memorials Fund in two fundamental ways. First, it was an
official programme, coming under the jurisdiction of the Department of Na¬
tional Defence. And second, only Canadian artists serving in (or inducted into)
the armed forces were included. The total numbers involved were smaller: only
32 individuals were given war artist commissions. But the scope of the works
they created was much broader: the artists worked with all three branches of
the armed forces, and the nature of the war meant much greater visual diver¬
sity, as they were active not only in Britain and Europe, but also in Alaska,
North Africa, the North Atlantic and the Pacific, and in addition covered the
home front. And the way the programme was structured meant that far more
items were acquired for the final collection — around 5,000 works.
The Canadian War Records programme was wound down in 1946 after the
end of hostilities; as a result, no official visual record exists of Canada’s part
in the Korean War. But in 1968 the Department of National Defence established
the Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Programme. Practising artists
were deployed to locations in Vietnam, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and
elsewhere to work alongside members of Canada’s armed forces and record
their life, often in connection with United Nations peace-keeping activities.!
This programme continued for almost thirty years, during which around 600
' The UN peace-keeping forces originated in response to the 1956 Suez crisis and were the
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