Troubled Brilliance

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 1959. For me, he was a TV star, on Canada’s still-fledgling CTV network. In 1961 I watched every segment of his series, The Things We See. I wanted to be an archaeologist, but was captivated by how Jarvis was able to reveal deeper significance in specific works of art, opening up hidden meanings. I was considering enrolling in Art and Archaeology, as the Department of Art at the University of Toronto was then called, and so made an appointment with the chair of the department, Stephen Vickers, in the spring of 1962. Walking up the stairs into the brand new Sidney Smith building I was astounded...