Art

490 LETTERS IN CANADA ART Given the increased interest in art perceptible everywhere today, the example of American and European publishers who contribute to the steady flow of expensive picture books from their presses, the fact of provincial and federal centennial celebrations on an almost annual footing , and the existence of the Canada Council as a benevolent godmother, it is hardly surprising that 1967 saw the birth of a dozen books more or less concerned with the visual arts in Canada. Some of them, it is true, are of a kind that is spawned by centennials and dies with the year to which it owed its brief existence. Others have a limited usefulness that earns them a tiny tribute of gratitude from the researcher in the piles of Canadian documents, though the prices at which they are published seem to be out of all proportion to their value. In this category one might as well place The Niagara Peninsula: Historical Prints and Ill"strations of the Niagara Peninsula, Province of Ontario, Canada, 1697-1880 (Montreal: Dev-Sco [Toronto: Longmans ], 1966, xii, 259, $15.) . In this very middle-aged-Iooking book, Charles deVolpi offers one hundred and fifty engravings of views of the N iagara Peninsula from the days of Hennepin to long after the invention of photography. Few of these views possess much artistic merit, but they are clearly of interest and importance to the historian in search of visual evidence of a topographic kind, and I assume that every library in Canada will be adding this unexciting and rather bald presentation to its historical reference shelves. The Toronto Public Library, as part of its centennial celebrations, has produced an illustrated reprint edition of Landmarks of Canada: A Guide to the J. Ross Robertson Canadian Historical Collection in the Toronto Public Library (2 vols.; Toronto Public Library, viii, 383, $15.), containing "oil paintings, water colours, sketches, engravings, etchings, lithographs and photographs . .. depicting Canadian scenes, people and events from very early times until 1918." The subjects of the portraits in the collections are indexed with a brief biography. Of Stephen Butler Leacock, for instance, we are told that ''he is known as the author of several books of fiction as well as works of an historical character," and just below this entry we find the roll of janitors at Upper Canada College from 1830-1917. The 1917 edition has been reproduced without annotation and amendment, and, while it is true that the Chief Librarian in bis introduction disarmingly confesses his awareness that "there are a HUMANITIES 491 number of errors in it, and that there are some things which would be done differently now," it is still not clear why anybody thought it was a good idea to produce this new, unrevised edition at a price of fifteen dollars, even in a centennial year. The format and make-up of the book appear to have been painstakingly designed to capture the flavour of janitorial taste between 1830 and 1917. A better looking book is A Heritage of Canadian Handicraft (McClelland and Stewart, xviii, 222, $7.95), which is a centennial contribution from the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada, and which consists of essays from a dozen different amateur historians of the crafts in Canada, under the general editorship of H. Gordon Green. Predictably these essays are very uneven in quality and dependability, and most of them are better than the rambling, diffuse, and misleading account of the crafts in British Columbia that is equally unfair to the native craftsmen , like Mungo Martin, and to the contemporary potters who have attracted attention all over Canada. It was a good idea to produce a book on Canadian handicrafts, but, having had this idea, the Women's Institutes would have done better to have commissioned contributions from the acknowledged authorities in each province and had them work under the editorship of someone like Miss Norah McCullough. Much more useful is The McMichael Conservation Collection: A Catalogue of Outstanding Work by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven (Clarke, Irwin, $5.95), with a helpful short introduction by Paul Duval. This collection, once private but now under the aegis of the Government of Ontario...