Art-history: Charles William Jefferys as Canada’s curator
- Art-history: Charles William Jefferys as Canada’s curator
A frequent contributor to the Journal, Dennis Duffy is Associate Professor of English at Trinity College, University of Toronto.
NOTES
* Overtly commercial art is often an exception to this, where the facial features will be stereotypically uninteresting and the body posed in a stylized manner to throw viewer attention upon the product displayed.
** One of its most characteristic stances, hands-in-air, legs-apart to form a triumphant X, became sufficiently identifiable as a victory sign to become — once confined to the upper half of the body — a staple in the gesture gallery of Presidents Elsenhower and Nixon.
1. Jefferys’ Herald Illustrations show no marked stylistic divergence from his later work for the Globe. The Herald work on the Pullman Strike (Jefferys’ signed drawings run from July 13–17, 1894) displays an interest in the less lurid and violent aspects of the conflict. Of course, the drawings of such subjects as beating a scab or setting fire to a train or the militia firing on the mob (the Herald’s term for the aggrieved workers) may have been executed by him. Like reporters, Illustrators weren’t given a byline for every appearance. It is also fair to note that the signed pieces come from a period after federal troops had smashed the strike, a more “peaceful” time than before. Nonetheless, it is true that the signed drawings are generally more concerned with groups of people at peace or in near-commonplace activities than with dramatic confrontations.
The Convention drawings (approximately July 5–11, 1896) present a sharp contrast with the Globe records of the Royal Tour. Where the latter are bird’s-eye, colourless biscuit-box views of ceremonial doings, the Convention drawings are filled with the intimate liveliness of the Sam Slick drawings. Other Herald artists concentrate upon the panoramic aspects of the raree show, while Jefferys presents small groups of people engaged in lively wheeling and dealing. Nothing shows better the glazed deadness of the Canadian sensibility in the presence of Royalty than the manner in which so vital an illustrator reduces himself in his 1901 Tour drawings to another dull memorialist.
2. Information from interview with one of Jefferys’ daughters, Mrs. Elizabeth Fee, Toronto, 7/vii/75.
3. A final volume would have followed had the artist lived longer; a number of the drawings in the Canada Public Archives collection deal with World War I training camps, for example. Where possible, I have referred in this article to works found in the Picture Gallery (Toronto: Ryerson, 1942–50) on the assumption that this text is the most widely available.
4. Wm. Colgate, C. W. Jefferys (Toronto: Ryerson, 1945), 28.
5. “History in Motion Pictures,” Canadian Historical Review, XXII (December, 1941), 361–68.
6. “The Visual Reconstruction of History,” CHR, XVII (Sept., 1936); 265.
7. J. E. Staley, “Jefferys — Painter of the Prairies,” Maclean’s Magazine, XXVI (July, 1913), 81.
8. Ralph Gabriel (ed.), The Pageant of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), VI, 38; I, 316. Mountie drawing: Illus. to Harwood Steele, “White Magic Versus Red,” Maclean’s, XLI (Aug. 15, 1928), 13.
9. Picture Gallery, II, 24.
10. Stephen Leacock, Canada: the Foundations of its Future (Montreal: Seagram’s Distillers, 1941), 84.
11. George M. Wrong, Ontario Public School History of Canada (Toronto: Ryerson, 1921), 161. The lady was, in fact, the grandmother of Sir Leonard Tilley.
12. See Malcolm M. Ross, Milton’s Royalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1943), passim.
13. Detailed explanations of this and other aspects of Jefferys’ career will appear in a full-length study of the artist by one of his grandsons, Mr. Robert Stacey. I am grateful to him for his assistance to me in the research for this piece.
14. As does Barry Lord in his The History of Painting in Canada (Toronto: NC Press, 1974), 117.
15. For example, see CWJ’s very royalist cartoon in The Moon (July 5, 1902), 75.
16. See CWJ’s cartoons in The Moon (August 2, 1902), 131; (August 9, 1902), 156.
17. The Moon (July 5, 12 and 19, 1902). The cartoons are not the work...
