From Neglect to Splendour

A half century ago, when I first went to Ottawa from Oxford University to join the Canadian foreign service, I still remember the shock. The city was so damn ugly. There were the marvellous neo-gothic Parliament buildings and the rest was an eyesore.

I was barely aware of the existence of the National Gallery of Canada. Although I had become interested in art while a student overseas, and had even begun to be a modest collector of prints and drawings, the National Gallery was not a place I had thought of as a destination. I knew from my travels that in Paris you went to the Louvre, in New York to the Met, in Washington to the National Gallery. But in Ottawa … well, that was a different matter.

My colleagues and I in the public service of the Government of Canada in the decades following World War II were educated, reasonably cultivated and interested in culture. But the National Gallery was hardly visible on our intellectual or physical landscape, tucked...