The Gaiety of Cables by Anthony Adamson, John Willard, and: A People’s Art: Primitive, Naïve, Provincial, and Folk Painting in Canada by J. Russell Harper, and: Douglas Duncan: A Memorial Portrait by Alan Jarvis, and: Albert Franck, Keeper of the Lanes by Harold Town (review)

duced, the quality of the reproductions worthy of Mr Beny's superb photography. (EMMET ROBBINS) Anthony Adamson and John Willard, The Gaiety of Gables: Ontario's Architectural Folk Art. McClelland and Stewart, unnumbered, $17.95; J. Russell Harper, A People's Art: Primitive, Na'ive, Provincial. and Folk Painting in Canada . University of Toronto Press, XI 1.76, $22.50; Alan Jarvis, editor, Douglas Duncan: A Memorial Portrait. University of Toronto Press, viii, 74, $7.50; Harold Town, Albert Franck, Keeper of the Lanes. McClelland and Stewart, 96, $22·5° Barge boards as Ontario's architectural folk art, the streets and lanes of Toronto and their Keeper, the Picture Loan Society and its gUiding presence , and primitive, naive, provincial and folk painting - the reader might well expect some delight from four books on these topics, especially when he handles them as physical objects, but he is bound to be agreeably taken with the affection, humour, and piety of the texts and the care shown in the selection of the plates. 'Gingerbread' is what the 'unversed' call the wooden ornamentation, sometimes delicate/ sometimes exuberant beneath the gables of houses and other buildings beginning in the 1840S. The more acceptable terms are 'barge boards' or 'verge boards': Anthony Adamson begins an etymological discussion but breaks off before reaching the Oxford English Dictionary. Much more thorough, within the limits of a book designed to be read for pleasure, is the account of architectural taste and practice in the nineteenth century, specifically vernacular architecture in Ontario. For clarity of exposition I would single out his account of the colonial bungalow with its verandah, as adapted to Canadian conditions; as an example of sharp wit, the comment on the Victorian worthy (inventor of the coat-hanger) - 'there was nothing he did not appear to know'; as an unfortunate lapse, the reference to a 'tear-jerking painting by Ford Maddox Brown: this being 'the Last of England: a picture of an emigrant couple aboard ship, sombre, redolent of the myrrh of parting, and, I think, marvellously composed. The photographs, by John Willard, are profuse and various (they are not numbered): at the end of an afternoon's session with the book one has the sense of having seen every kind of barge board from every good angle (many of them enterprising and difficult, none merely tricky) in all seasons. I shall in future drive more slowly through Ontario towns and countryside. Albert Franck is not the sort of painter you need to be kind to: the achievement is there and it is solid. Yet Albert Franck, Keeper of the Lanes, as well as being an informative introduction to his work and a 420 LETTERS IN CANADA generous pictorial record, is, in overplus, a friendly tribute to the man. The greatly gifted Harold Town, justly feared as a polemicist, here shows his ability to evoke a person and a scene. The scene - old Toronto, for Franck eventually 'seceded from everything north of Davenport Road' and devoted himself to the painting of houses that were 'cathedrals of the ordinary, cocoons of the humdrum, painted as seriously as if they were primal structures, essential to a full understanding of man.' (In comparison, the houses of Lawren Harris are 'succulent.') The person solid , dependable, a burgher, a Dutch uncle to young artists, 'sensual and prudish, convivial and reclusive, anti-religious and intensely mora1.' Franck took a scunner to religion at an early age, and it is to Town's credit that he does not claim for him the status of a religiOUS teacher on that sole ground. Instead, he tells stories, good ones, of his humanity and humour - as for instance his carving a likeness of the critic Augustus Bridle from a turnip. (By the way, W.B. Yeats called George Moore a man carved from a turnip: I wonder if this is a literary influence, direct or mediated, on Franck's art?) And he draws our attention to the things that Franck does best, and by implication to his limits: 'Franck was the court painter of lanes whose snow - soot snow, salt snow, yellow snow, city snow - was as old as the houses and pavement it covered. He was...