Canada’s Homeless Portrait Gallery

Locked in a high-tech storage and laboratory facility in western Quebec, way beyond the sightlines of Parliament Hill, is a most intriguing collection. Inside Vault 34 at the Library and Archives Canada Preservation Centre, dozens of paintings are hung on rolling art racks, about one foot apart. Between cold cement walls, under brutal fluorescent lighting, a helpful curator rolls them out for the occasional visitor.

Eighteenth-century British soldiers rub shoulders with 20th-century musicians. Along with unsophisticated depictions painted “in the style of” or “from the school of,” there are works by well-known artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Jerry Grey and Frederick Varley. There are the “Indian kings”: life-size images of four North American Indian leaders who visited the court of Queen Anne in 1710 and were painted in ceremonial dress by Jan Verelst. The collection also boasts thousands of Karsh prints and negatives, in which heroic individuals loom out of...