The Beaverbrook Art Gallery is an oddity—a major cultural attraction in one of Canada’s regional cities. For Fredericton, New Brunswick, the gallery is the jewel in the crown of Lord Beaverbrook’s munificence to that small city that included a library, a theatre and a hockey arena among many other donations. Adorning the gallery’s walls are paintings by Botticelli, Constable, Dali, Delacroix, Hogarth, Reynolds, Sickert and Turner. The Canadian collection includes paintings by Emily Carr, Paul Kane, Cornelius Krieghoff, David Milne, Jean-Paul Riopelle and the Group of Seven. Less known is the fact that the gallery keeps a number of lower quality paintings under wraps. When the Beaverbrook Art Gallery first opened in 1959, John Steegman of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts recommended keeping the duds in storage where they would not detract from the beauty of the truly valuable paintings in the collection. Good advice as it turned out, but even then, the gallery could not avoid...
Greg Marchildon is Ontario Research Chair in Health Policy and System Design at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is also the Founding Director of the North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies.
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