Renaissance Art in Montreal: The City's Early Collectors and their Gifts to the Art Association of Montreal and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Scholarly research on Montreal collectors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has, for the most part, focused on their interest in 17th century Dutch portraiture and rural scenes, landscapes of The Hague and Barbizon schools and modern British pictures. The author examines the presence of Renaissance art within the Montreal cultural milieu by following the activities of collectors such as Sir William Van Horne, Richard B. Angus, Robert Wilson Reford, Lord Strathcona, Charles and Elwood Hosmer, and F. Cleveland Morgan. The author points out that some of these men were wealthy Scottish-Protestants who set in motion a paradigm for contributing to society through donating their collections to the city's leading art institution, the Art Association of Montreal (later to be re-named the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). She argues that by situating their activities within this framework of collecting and donating, it is possible to provide a picture of how the Renaissance collection of the Museum came to be. She points out that looking at this same trajectory reveals that there were significant works of European art that escaped transmission from collectors' hands to Museum walls, making the collection less envious than it might have otherwise been.

Master's Thesis

Concordia University

Montreal

2010

vi-147p.

en