Huron Indian Trapper on Snowshoes: Cornelius David Krieghoff

In 1845, Cornelius Krieghoff moved to Paris where he registered at the Louvre as a copyist under the tutelage of Michel-Martin Drölling, further developing his skill for genre compositions and landscape. He returned to Montreal, Canada in 1846. He produced prints of his own paintings which appealed to an aspiring middle class and moved to Quebec City in 1853 where he connected with the auctioneer, John Budden, who was employed by A.J. Maxham & Company.

Budden introduced Krieghoff to the city’s elite, including local merchants and British military officers. In 1852, the city had also once again become the capital of the Province of Canada and Krieghoff benefitted from the resulting increase in trade. The array of scenes he depicted included the full range of life in early French Canada, from quotidian labour such as trading, trapping, farming, hunting and ice-fishing, to images of Indigenous settlements, card-players and celebrations at the local public house, to sugar harvesting, and horses and carriages.

A savvy businessman with an entrepreneurial approach, Krieghoff’s market was primarily Anglophone. At the same time as he produced numerous small paintings depicting various views of the same scene or individual, he also began making engravings and lithographs.

These recurring themes for his work focussed on popularizing fall and winter scenes from Quebec, folksy settings and a variety of characters which he widely reproduced, from Indigenous peoples to the early habitant settlers, who were farmers in the ‘New France.’

Krieghoff’s were the first formal landscapes from the region and departed from those of topographers who worked primarily in watercolours electing for a traditional approach to easel painting, using finished oils on canvas. Krieghoff’s stays in Quebec were his most prolific periods, and his idealized depictions of rural life were well circulated informing a kind of ‘popular culture’ of its day.

His figures were often not individual portraits; their focus instead was on the clues provided by clothing and surrounding objects, symbolic interpretation and inventions based on assumptions, repeating motifs and romanticization. As such, they have been critiqued for their role in reinforcing stereotypes and settler colonial narratives of early frontier life. His work was both celebrated by ethnologist Marius Barbeau, who wrote Cornelius Krieghoff: Pioneer Painter of North America in 1934 and criticized by art historian Gérard Morisset for their generic representations, including of First Nations people.

Krieghoff moved to Europe in 1863, and continued to work, maintaining his network of connections in Quebec, painting and selling the same Canadian themes from a distance and in 1870, he moved to Chicago where he died in 1872. Over his career, he produced an estimated 1,500-2,000 works including paintings and prints, and his popular work was the source of imitation and forgery.

Krieghoff’s approach to Indigenous subjects, labour and the land is exemplified in Huron Indian Trapper on Snowshoes. The figure of the trapper is a common and recurrent motif in Krieghoff’s work. The artist focuses on the accoutrements, including clothing, snowshoes and hunting gear. The detail of the landscape and figure provides a generalized context and satisfies what would have been to settler and European audiences alike, a familiar snow-laden image of Canada and its Indigenous inhabitants.

Not quite a portrait, this figure operates as an emblem of the traditional Indigenous trapper, exuding at once a kind of familiarity to the settler imagination, whose curiosity about the skills of the trapper are rendered apprehendable, familiar and folksy in the artist’s symbolic and romantic interpretation. The typified bright red hat, embroidered pouch, details of the fabrication of winter leggings, fringing and moccasins are informational rather than intimate. The figure, enduring under an overcast winter sky, exudes solitariness, efficiency and knowledge about the functioning of the natural world—a trapper out on his rounds, shown with a confident, casual and relaxed gesture oft-repeated by Krieghoff: a rifle on his shoulder and pipe in his mouth. There is an entwinement, suggesting some of the early impacts of colonization via the tools at hand (a rifle) while also alluding to the craftsmanship these garments and objects demonstrate about the Indigenous way of life.

Contributed by Lisa Baldissera. Baldissera has worked in curatorial roles in public art galleries in Western Canada since 1999, including Senior Curator (Contemporary Calgary), Chief Curator (Mendel Art Gallery) and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. She has produced more than seventy exhibitions of local, Canadian, and international artists and holds MFAs in Creative Writing (UBC), Art (University of Saskatchewan) and a PhD in Art Writing and Curating (Goldsmiths College). She is the author of Emily Carr: Art and Life (Art Canada Institute) and Convoluted Beauty: In the Company of Emily Carr (Mendel Art Gallery). She is currently the Director of Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver, BC.

ABOUT THE AUCTION

Headlining our major fall 2026 Canadian & International Fine Art auction are works by renowned Canadian artists Cornelius Krieghoff, Gordon Appelbe Smith, Frederick Arthur Verner, A.J. Casson, A.Y. Jackson, and William Kurelek, alongside international offerings by Edouard Cortès and Henri Lebasque. Also featured is a collection of works by Georges Mathieu, David Milne, and Eduardo Paolozzi from an Important Private Collection. Additional highlights include exceptional, unpublished works by Fernand Léger and Sir Alfred James Munnings.

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On View:
Saturday, November 14 from 12 pm to 4 pm
Sunday, November 15 from 12 pm to 4 pm
Monday, November 16 from 10 am to 5 pm
Tuesday, November 17 from 10 am to 7 pm
Wednesday, November 18 from 10 am to 5 pm

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