The introduction to Winter Count: Embracing the Cold serves notice that the paintings in the National Gallery of Canada’s big exhibition by the same title are not to be taken lightly. Jean-François Bélisle, the museum’s director and CEO, repeatedly leans into words like “endurance,” “resilience,” and “survival.” As he puts it in this handsome and bilingual…
John Geddes
John Geddes previously worked as the Ottawa bureau chief for Maclean’s.
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John Geddes
Leafing through the lushly illustrated pages of the National Gallery of Canada’s book of highlights from its works-on-paper collection, any art lover with a taste for tradition might sigh with contentment. Pause to admire Roman ruins rendered in black ink by Giovanni Paolo Panini, a refined row of trees in graphite by Vilhelm Hammershøi, a pastel of a woman fixing her hair by Camille…
A few years ago, the comedian James Acaster did a bit about the British Museum. He started by summarizing how it had acquired its collection: “Everyone in Britain got in a big old boat, and we set sail and we robbed (and this’ll sound far-fetched) everyone in the world.” Acaster went on to imagine a visitor from a former colony confidently arriving to reclaim some obviously pilfered…
In 1829, the fur-trading ship Volunteer sailed down the east coast of Haida Gwaii, then known to the wider world as the Queen Charlotte Islands, passing the village of Skidegate. Travelling with the traders was the missionary Jonathan S. Green, the first outsider to record his impressions of its cedar plank houses and totem…