Troubled Brilliance
Meticulous research casts new light on a leading artistic interpreter December 2009
In my last years of high school, Alan Jarvis was one of my heroes. I knew nothing of his brilliant but stormy tenure as head of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, or of his operatic run-in with the Canadian government over his insistence on purchasing a number of great—and expensive—European Old Masters and the loss of his job over those acquisitions in…