Krieghoff: Images of Canada by Dennis Reid (review)

424 letters in canada 1999 Hair concludes by describing his scholarly intentions in relation to works by David Shaw, Hillis Miller, and Isobel Armstrong B good company in which Hair's work is not out of place. (CHRIS JENNINGS) Dennis Reid. Krieghoff: Images of Canada Douglas and McIntyre/Art Gallery of Ontario. xii, 324. 152 colour illus. $85.00 In his Preface to Krieghoff: Images of Canada, Dennis Reid describes Krieghoff as `the best-known but least-understood nineteenth-century Canadian artist.' This is surely no longer the case, thanks to this impressive book and the accompanying retrospective exhibition which is travelling to major galleries across Canada, closing in Montreal on 8 October 2001. With essays by Dennis Reid, Ramsay Cook, and François-Marc Gagnon and superb colour reproductions of Krieghoff's work, one to a page, this book places Krieghoff and his work in the privileged position of being among the few nineteenth-century Canadian artists to receive such thorough scholarly attention. Dennis Reid, chief curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, has devoted years to this project. He has exhaustively pursued the smallest leads, and in his essay `Cornelius Krieghoff: The Development of a Canadian Artist,' he offers the most coherent biography to date of the elusive and itinerant artist. He establishes, for example, that Krieghoff did not pursue formal studies at the Dusseldorf Academy and that he was not involved in either informal drawing groups or artists' associations in this city. A small point, perhaps, but it frees Krieghoff from a century of assumed artistic influences and opens the way for a fresh investigation of this largely selftaught artist's artistic and philosophical sources. The Krieghoff that emerges from the wealth of material and interpretation offered by this book's three essayists is far more interesting than the facile genre painter popularized through frequent reproduction of works such as Merrymaking. Krieghoff, who lived in various locations in Quebec between 1840 and 1871, was a prolific artist B as well as doing prints, he painted portraits, landscapes, and scenes with habitants and aboriginal people, and he frequently repeated themes such as habitants socializing at the Jolifou Inn or bilking the toll. Seen together, these works document, according to Reid, `a changing vision of Canada as it evolved from colony to nation.' (Krieghoff died in 1872, five years after Confederation.) The three essays in this book, although different in approach and focus, underline the importance of reading Krieghoff and his work in light of the significant social, political, and economic issues of the day: Reid, for example, situates the major habitant canvases from 1856 on within the discourses surrounding the program of colonisation in Canada East, while Ramsay Cook, in addition to humanities 425 pointing out how issues like farm productivity and rural poverty shaped the life of the habitant portrayed by Krieghoff, offers an engaging discussion of the different breeds of horses seen in his canvases. There are, of course, questions that can be asked about Krieghoff's work: questions concerning his representation of French-Canadian and aboriginal people, questions about whose version of contemporary life he was chronicling and why, and questions about his overall significance in the canon of Canadian Art History. François-Marc Gagnon's essay,`Perceiving the Other: French-Canadian and Indian Iconography in the Work of Cornelius Krieghoff,' offers a lively and informed discussion of these issues and others. Gagnon's essay deals at length with the Dutchborn Krieghoff's construction of `the Other,' a topic which he introduces by using the writings of the French-Canadian art historian Gérard Morisset to interrogate the enthusiastic response to Krieghoff's work by EnglishCanadian writers such as Newton MacTavish (Morisset was especially aggrieved by their disregard B or possibly ignorance Bof the important roles played by earlier French-speaking artists in Quebec). Of the paintings themselves, Gagnon observes that `we French-Canadians, and Morisset in particular, fail to recognize ourselves in Krieghoff's pictures,' and the reader surmises that if asked, aboriginal people might say much the same thing. This book is sure to prompt renewed interest in the work of Cornelius Krieghoff. At the same time, it makes a persuasive case...