Additional Images

Provenance:

Senator John Wilson, Ontario
Edward Bayley, Toronto, nephew of Senator Wilson (by descent)
Miss Geneva Jackson, Kitchener
Carroll Fine Arts Limited, Toronto
Kaspar Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:

Marius Barbeau, Cornelius Krieghoff, Pioneer Painter of North America, Toronto, 1934, page 132, listed.

Dennis Reid, “Cornelius Krieghoff: The Development of the Canadian Artist,” in Images of Canada, Dennis Reid, (ed.), Douglas & McIntyre and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1999, pages 44-47, 55, 58, 60, 78-79, 83, and 86.

Ramsey Cook, “The Outsider as Insider: Cornelius Krieghoff’s Art of Describing,” in Images of Canada, Dennis Reid, (ed.), Douglas & McIntyre and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1999, pages 145-147, 149, 152, 156, and 163.

François-Marc Gagnon, “Perceiving the Other: French Canadian and Indian Iconography in the work of Cornelius Kreighoff,” in Images of Canada, Dennis Reid, (ed.), Douglas & McIntyre and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1999, pages 208-211, 226-229, and 231-232.

Exhibited:

Exhibition of Cornelius Krieghoff, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1934

Note:

Arriving in Montreal in 1840 from Amsterdam, by way of the United States, Cornelius Krieghoff became an important cultural figure in Canadian art history. His images have been central to the creation of a collective consciousness about our past. His depictions of rural French Canadian life, First Nations peoples and the grandiose forests have been used to narrate a Canadian timeline, one that romanticises the hard working and austere lifestyle of the peasant farmer in the path towards progress, Confederation and industrial revolution in Canada.

Between 1841 and 1867 Canada evolved from colony to fully fledged country. Krieghoff was instrumental in documenting this rapidly changing climate, insofar as he did not actually record the urbanization and industrialization that was occurring at the time. Instead, he focused primarily on the rural Francophone and Native population that was being slowly eclipsed by English colonization, elevating such themes in the process.

Krieghoff’s precise renderings evidence his artistic training in Dutch and German genre painting, yet his choice of subject matter and his conscious decision to portray the human condition within his work largely differentiates Krieghoff from his contemporaries, who concentrated mainly on sacred, historical, and formal portrait subject matter. In Indian Camp we see Krieghoff’s background in German Romanticism, whereby the natural world is pictured as a sublime force, insurmountable and impenetrable by human endeavours. The Indians pictured in the foreground are represented almost as part of the landscape, working and living harmoniously with nature. The two women figures appear lost in conversation, unaware of Krieghoff’s painterly interjection. Krieghoff admired the simplicity of life he associated with Native Americans, viewing his representations as positive affirmations of a primitive life untouched by civilization.

According to Marius Barbeau, the work was painted circa 1843-6, and is considered by him to be one of the earliest Krieghoff pictures.