Index to Nineteenth-Century Canadian Exhibition and Auction Catalogs of ArtAuthor(s): Jonathan FranklinSource: Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 20,No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 36-38Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27949123 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 10:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press and Art Libraries Society of North America are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmerica.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 10:35:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BRAIN WAVE

Index to Nineteenth-Century Canadian Exhibition and Auction Catalogs of Art _

by Jonathan Franklin, National Gallery of Canada

Critical attention has focused on early twentieth-century Canadian art, in particular, the Group of Seven, and less on the

nineteenth-century context from which it sprang. This context can be reconstructed from surviving documents of the time,

including exhibition and auction catalogs. Although some exhi bition catalogs have been indexed in the past, comprehensive coverage of this material is the objective of a new project at the National Gallery of Canada Library. This paper will describe the

purpose of the project in the context of Canadian exhibition his

tory, the database structure, the type of data indexed, and future

plans for access.

Exhibition History The project is modeled, in some respects inevitably, upon

the National Museum of American Art's 6-volume Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogs: from the beginning through the 1876 Centennial Year.1 In the introduction to that work is a sum

mary history of the art exhibition in the United States to 1876. The exhibition situation in Canada was comparable to that of the U.S. with certain differences, chiefly the flow of ecclesiastical

patronage in Quebec. For example, Antoine Plamondon, the dominant artist of Quebec City during the nineteenth century, exhibited fourteen Stations of the Cross to a paying public, only because the works had been rejected by the clergy who commis sioned them. Six years earlier in 1833, an exhibition of

seventy-five European paintings in Quebec, including a Bacchus and Ariadne by Guido Reni, had elicited from the prickly Plamondon unfavourable comparisons with his own work!

Nineteenth-century art exhibitions in Canada were a mixed

bag. The portrait painter J.W.L. Forster (1850-1938) reminisced: "an enterprise of the Toronto artists in those days was competi tion at the autumn Fairs, wherever a prize list offered inducement enough to repay the effort and expense. The vari

ously coloured prize tickets afterwards emblazoned the vicinity of the studio mirror to impress visitors with their proud and con

vincing array."2 It was at the Upper Canada Agricultural Exhibition in

Brockville that Paul Kane caused a sensation in 1851 with his scenes of Indian Ufe out west. Later there were exhibitions by artists' societies, including the Women's Art Association, com mercial gallery exhibitions and auctions (catalogs of these have been indexed by the project, in contrast to the Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogs). There were displays of single works

from the popular panoramas of scenery, battles, and bibUcal tableaux (one, of Jerusalem, is on display to this day at Sainte

Anne-de-Beaupr? near Quebec City), to 'star' paintings such as M?let's Angelus. And there were more permanent displays arranged by historical societies or educational authorities; for

example, the Canadian Educational Museum at the Toronto Normal School opened in 1857 with a large coUection of plaster casts, oil copies, and prints.

Even charitable pubUc building projects might raise money from a loan exhibition, such as the art featured alongside "Autograph Letters from the Late and Present Kings of Siam" to

Anna Leonowens in a show benefiting the Halifax Art School, which she championed. In addition, there were industrial exhi bitions and photographic exhibitions, all of which this project eventually seeks to index.

The Project's Objective The index aims to enrich the study of the history of art in

Canada in three ways. First, in the course of research on a par ticular artist, the database may be consulted to establish or extend his/her oeuvre. Second, the provenance of a particular work may be traced. For example, the database includes a work in the National GaUery of Canada's own collection, Charlotte Schreiber 's The croppy boy, which was on sale at the Toronto Industrial Exhibition of 1879 at $250; if you are wondering what a croppy boy is, visit the Gallery's Cybermuse Website:

http://cybermuse.gaUery.ca. Third, the database should permit some general analysis of artistic life and activity in nineteenth

century Canada.

The initiative for the project arose from involvement with the Library's auction catalog collection referenced in Nineteenth

century Canadian catalogues of art at auction: a bibliographical list

ing.3 Forty nineteenth century catalogs were already indexed in two publications by Evelyn McMann: Royal Canadian Academy of ArtsIAcad?mie royale des arts du Canada: exhibitions and members, 1880-19794 and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, formerly Art Association of Montreal: spring exhibitions 1880-1970.5 In addition, twenty-two other Canadian catalogs, including some of the choicest early ones, are indexed by the Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogs. It is intended that the entries in these publi cations wiU be transcribed into the project database for the sake of completeness.

36 Art Documentation ? Volume 20, Number 1 ? 2001

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 10:35:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Database Structure

Since the National Gallery of Canada is officially a bilingual institution, the database functions in both English and French; the project's French title is Index aux catalogues canadiens du 19e si?cle d'expositions et de ventes aux ench?res d'oeuvres d'art. Inmagic DBTextWorks software is used. The database actually consists of three linked files, one for the exhibitions, one for the works of art

exhibited, and one for the information associated with a particu lar work of art at a particular exhibition. For example, the third file might include the catalog number, price, and owner (i.e., information not essential to the work of art itself but merely con

tingent upon its appearance in the exhibition).

By separating these elements, the database permits the

indexing of a single work at more than one exhibition when such identification can be made, although in practice this has been done very sparingly. Titles often were recycled by artists or

assigned by others, so that congruence of artist and title may not suffice to identify two works as one and the same. Details of

provenance or history can provide evidence for identification, but even then it may prove impossible to adjudicate between variant entries. For example, two catalogs from New Brunswick in 1879 and 1880 both list what is surely the same painting. But is the title breezy evening off Ramsgate' by William Callow, lent by W. Thompson, or breezy day off Ramsgate' by John Callow, lent by Wm. Thomson?

Integration of the index with local bibliographic databases is

slightly complex. MARC records for exhibition catalogs, many in

photocopy format, already exist in the Library's OPAC catalog accessible via the Web: http: //bibcat.gallery.ca. However, index records could not be directly linked to the OPAC records; instead, duplicate records were created in the DBTextWorks

database, each record containing a field to record the system number for the equivalent record in the OPAC. If future software

developments permit, it may be possible to link the index direct

ly to the main catalog, perhaps through a Web application. Records for auction catalogs, on the other hand, are held not in the OPAC but in two other places: in the SCIPIO database in RLIN where catalog records are created, and in a locally net worked DBTextWorks database to which the SCIPIO records are downloaded for easy access after creation.

Consequently, the index to the contents of the nineteenth

century Canadian auction catalogs was able to be integrated with the local DBTextWorks database, having been built with the same software package. And, as with the OPAC catalog, the record numbers in the SCIPIO system are also entered in the local records, so that the relationships can be further exploited in the future should this became desirable.

Data Description The following sample entry from the database illustrates the

fields used within each data record.

SAMPLE ENTRY Artist: Carlyle, Florence, 1864-1923

Title: Mere Adele.

Medium: Oil [Painting] Exhibited at: Women's Art Association of Canada.

Catalogue of ninth annual exhibition of the Women's Art Association.

March 01,1897 - March 17,1897

Toronto, Ontario

Catalogue number: 9

Notes: The model who posed for Millet's

Angelus.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 10:35:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Credit Line: Carlyle, Miss Florence

Artist address: Woodstock, Ont.

Price: $75

Artists' names are entered into the database in authoritative

forms with reference to major dictionaries and online sources. Unlike the Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogs, which refus es to conflate variant names (e.g. Raffaelle, Raffaello, Raphael), judgment is exercised in the identification of artists' names. At the same time, the user is permitted to exercise his/her own

judgment by means of the Credit Line field, where the artist's name is entered precisely as it occurs in the catalog.

Work titles are transcribed as they appear, with the proviso that capitalization is restricted to proper names, and glaring mis

spellings are dealt with by entering the correct form in square brackets. Media have been entered at two levels: a transcript of the medium as listed in the catalog is entered first, with a second

entry in the same field containing an applied category. Thus works listed as l^ronze,' 'marble,' 'plaster,' etc., can be searched

and retrieved under the category 'sculpture.' The Notes field is used to accommodate notes printed in the catalog itself; addi tional indexers' notes are kept to an absolute minimum and indicated by the use of square brackets. Other information, such as artist's address, price, dimensions and signature details, is entered whenever present.

Only a handful of works in nineteenth-century catalogs was illustrated, often where an individual artist wished to glam orize a sale catalog of his own work. These occurrences are

recorded in the database. The index currently does not have a full subject index; however, inspired by the Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogs, a geographical index to the works of art,

topographically identified by their titles, chiefly landscapes, has been initiated.

Future Developments For the future, plans are underway for World Wide Web

access to the index to enable free consultation by scholars, researchers, art market professionals, students and the general

public. Ultimately, any reference to a work of art in Canada dur

ing the nineteenth century, whether in a published catalog, a

newspaper article, or a manuscript, should be indexed in the database. It is projected then that the database may grow to

approximately 20,000 records. At the same time, the accumula tion of indexed catalogs should permit the generation of a desiderata list, especially for incomplete numbered series of exhibitions extending over several years. There is no doubt that

yet more catalogs in other libraries and archives await discovery and indexing.

The National Gallery of Canada Library is grateful to the summer students and volunteers whose dedication and hard work has made the index possible.

Notes

1. James L. Yarnall and William H. Gerdts, The National Museum of American Art's Index to American Art Exhibition

Catalogues: From the Beginning Through the 1876 Centennial Year. (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1986).

2. John Wycliffe Lowes Forster, Under the Studio Light: Leaves From a Portrait Painter's Sketch Book. (Toronto, Ontario: Macmillan, 1928): 13.

3. Nineteenth Century Canadian Catalogues of Art At Auction: A

Bibliographical Listing, Occasional Papers Series, no. 4 (Ottawa, Ontario: National Gallery of Canada Library, 2000).

4. Evelyn McMann, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts/Acad?mie Royale des Arts du Canada: Exhibitions and Members, 1880-1979. (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1981).

5. Evelyn McMann, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, formerly Art Association of Montreal: Spring Exhibitions 1880-1970 (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

38 Art Documentation ? Volume 20, Number 1 ? 2001

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 10:35:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions