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Snow and Ice: The Canadian Winter
In his studio, Notman creates scenes that represent Canada to the world.Transcription
Narrator
Montreal, in winter, takes a holiday. But not William Notman. He has figured out a way to keep busy in winter. He decides to create scenes in the studio that represent Canada to the world, and what, he thinks, better represents Canada than snow and ice?
Dennis Reid, Chief Curator, Art Gallery of Ontario
Dennis Reid
One thing we have to remember is that winter in the 19th century represented something quite different than what it does for us today. In the 19th century you traveled on the river, and you traveled on pretty bad roads when you could, and they didn’t go very far. Winter gave a kind of freedom of mobility that you didn’t have during the summertime. So, if you had a sleigh and a, you know, good, strong horse you could get a lot of place faster in the winter than you could during the summer.
Dennis Reid
And not only that, particularly in the rural areas, you didn’t have the work to do in the winter that you had to do during the summer or in the spring and fall. And so it was a time of leisure, it was a time when people tended to gather together and get around a warm fire, and so the winter represented a good moment in the cycle of the year.
William Notman
I will now try to describe how I produced the wintry effects which have met with so much approval. Suitable background: This is very essential; the best effects are produced with a middle tint of gray, not too strongly broken with dark clouds, and with a few lights near the horizon.
William Notman
Snow cover: This I find, after many experiments, to be best represented by white fur, such as that of the Arctic fox, or by salt; the latter is perhaps the best, as it can be thrown on and about the various objects in the scene.
William Notman
Falling snow: there is but one way I know to produce this effect, but as it is so simple, and answers so well, I have never sought for any other....
Dennis Reid
Now this is a remarkable photograph of young William McFarlane Notman, one of William Notman’s sons, a photograph that’s entitled by Notman “Young Canada” and was taken in 1867, so it’s obviously meant to have a great deal of portent. And of course it’s just laden with all the signs of Canadianness that were so cherished at the time. He’s wearing a blanket coat, what was sometimes called a Red River coat, he’s wearing a scarf around his waist that’s fastened as though it’s a ceinture fléchée, he has snowshoes on, and of course he’s sitting on what purports to be the banks of the St. Lawrence river frozen behind and is a studio backdrop, and the photograph has been doctored a great deal to put him in a friendly blizzard. An icon.
Joan M. Schwartz, Queens University / National Archives of Canada
Joan M. Schwatz
The desire of the British military administrators who came here, for them to be Canadian was to participate in robust winter sports. The photograph of Lady Dufferin in the studio, with her children, simulating a tobogganing scene, was very much the wife of the governor general saying to all elite ladies that they can go outside when it’s cold, that they should go tobogganing and skating, and they should participate in winter events.
Joan M. Schwatz
All of the things that happened around Montreal, the ice carnivals, the snowshoe tramps, that was part of being Canadian, and I think that Notman certainly contributed to the sense of winter as a bracing time. The scenes that he created in his studio reinforced the notion that the British imperial male on the colonial frontier was a robust man.
