Oldal 180 [180]
CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS
photography they were trained in drawing so as to be able to produce accurate
visual records of places and objects that were thought to have some military
importance. But often their drawings were more than merely mechanical,
revealing genuine esthetic feeling and at times real artistic talent, and many
of the earliest depictions of the Canadian landscape come from their hands.
This was augmented in the mid-nineteenth century by genre painting, as seen
most notably in the prolific output of Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-1872), char¬
acterized by idealized scenes of village life and the surrounding countryside
in Québec. The central position of landscape painting prevailed and even
strengthened following the birth of an independent Canada in 1867 as part of
efforts to “brand” the new dominion. It was no accident that the first President
of the newly-founded (1880) Royal Canadian Academy of Art, Lucius O’Brien
(1832-1899), was almost exclusively a landscape painter, or that one of his
works, Sunrise on the Saguenay, was the first diploma piece in the Academy’s
first annual exhibition and in fact the first work acquired by the National
Gallery of Canada. At that point in time, however, a distinctively Canadian
landscape tradition had not yet developed: the natural world was still being
interpreted visually through second-hand, outdated European artistic conven¬
tions. But a specific space only exists for the imagination when it is captured
in some original way in a new artistic form, whether verbal or visual. In the
case of Canada, this only began to happen towards the end of the nineteenth
century — take the examples of Archibald Lampman (1861-1899) in poetry
and Homer Watson (1855-1936) in painting. As a result, the Canadian artists
who were involved in the War Memorials Fund project at the time of World
War I were among the first to be engaged in this project of “creating Canada”
visually.
There were, in fact, two generations of artists in the programme. The older
generation was represented by James Wilson Morrice (1865-1924) and Maurice
Cullen (1866-1934). When young, both had gone to Paris, where they studied
at prestigious art schools and learned the lessons of Impressionism and post¬
Impressionism, which they then employed, as pioneers, in their later work in
Canada. Their winter scenes, in particular, which captured the way the sharp
Canadian light interacts with snow, were pivotal in creating a distinctive Ca¬
nadian landscape tradition. The most influential Canadian World War I artists
in the younger generation were A.Y Jackson (1882-1974), Frederick Varley
(1881-1969) and David Milne (1882-1953). Jackson had trained in Montréal,
Chicago and Paris, while Varley in Sheffield and Antwerp, Milne in New York.
All had absorbed the lessons of Impressionism and post-Impression; Milne
had actually exhibited at the 1913 Armory show in New York, where he was
exposed to the European avant-garde and styles like Fauvism and Cubism. But
none of this had prepared any of them for how to deal with what they con¬
fronted in Europe. Not just the unprecedented violence of the war, but also, as
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