William Notman, along with a host of forgotten artists, gets his 21st-century moment
William Notman—one of Canada’s pioneering and now near-forgotten artists—sailed from Glasgow to Montreal in 1856, one step ahead of the law. There had been a certain artistic licence in his bookkeeping as he tried to keep the family business afloat; the term “fraud” was levelled by those holding the company’s debts. It was decided that Notman would take one for the clan by shouldering the blame, get a clean start in the new world, and spare prison time for the rest of the family.
Books and an institute fill a void that 44-year-old Angel, an arts journalist and former book publisher and magazine editor, discovered early in her second career as an art scholar. “It became apparent to me very quickly that there is a scarcity of material available on Canadian historical artists,” she says. While the Group of Seven or Emily Carr merit academic attention, she says, “anybody who wasn’t a major artist, there really wasn’t that much available—and online there was even less.
His place in history was impacted by the question that has bedevilled artists through the ages: It’s interesting, but is it art? Few if any museums of his era collected photography, as Parsons notes in her forthcoming ebook. “When Notman’s photographs were reprinted or displayed, it was often for their subjects rather than as examples of their creator’s work.
Maclean’s helped save Notman from obscurity. In 1956 the magazine was part of a consortium that purchased his entire archive of almost 500,000 plates, prints and negatives, and donated them to McGill University to be housed in Montreal’s McCord Museum. The magazine then ran a series of Notman photo essays, the first being a sprawling November 1956 cover story written by Pierre Berton. Berton’s story marked the centenary of Notman’s arrival in Canada.
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