Imperialist intent - colonial response : the art collection and cultural milieu of Lord Strathcona in nineteenth-century Montreal

This thesis addresses the nineteenth-century art collection of Donald Alexander Smith, Lord Strathcona (1820--1914), in relation to intersecting questions of imperialism, colonial relations, and cultural status. Both the formation of the collection and its dispersal are linked to a dialectic of cultural hegemony and national identity in nineteenth-century Canada. Smith came penniless to Montreal from Scotland in 1838, became the wealthiest man in Canada by the end of the century, and is known as Lord Strathcona after being raised to the peerage by Queen Victoria in 1897. My discussion of the rise and fall of Strathcona's collection is informed by postcolonial theory and its critical re-reading of imperialism. While British imperialism was the ideology that governed Strathcona's activities, Anthony Giddens's structuration theory is introduced to account for how personal agency remains operative within this dominant ideology. Strathcona formed a significant collection of European paintings and Asian art, which was, however, largely dispersed by the institution charged with its care, thus reducing its significance. Krzysztof Pomian's concept of collectors as select individuals who mediate symbolic cultural power through semiotic constructs provides an important methodological anchor for an analysis of the collector and his collection, as does Carol Duncan's work on the motivation to collect art and to structure cultural identity through control of museums. As well, the princely model of collecting reveals the humanist values operative throughout the centuries by comparison of Strathcona to the Medici in terms of the deployment of spectacle. This thesis makes use of primary source materials to compare Strathcona's collection to several of his peers in order to place him in his cultural milieu during a time in Canadian history when Montreal was a British enclave in a French province. Analysis of fragmented primary source inventories, catalogues, personal letters, and records held by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Archives of Canada, identification of paintings documented in the Notman photographs of 1914--1915, and my tracing of the public portraits of Strathcona by Robert Harris still on view in Montreal institutions allowed me to create useful inventories that previously did not exist.

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