After years of raising donations and working within a small budget, the Bytown Museum has finally restored a 19th-century painting showing two daughters of a high-ranking Hudson’s Bay Company officer.
The painting features Annie and Mary McLeod, two daughters of HBC’s John McLeod. Sporting old fashioned dresses and carrying contemplative gazes, the portrait was likely painted when they were between the ages of 10 and 15. The 11-inch work now appears remarkably glossy, but was once considerably deteriorated.
“The painting was overall in quite poor condition”, says David Legris, the local art conservator who repaired the double portrait.
His family business, Legris Conservation Inc., has restored several pieces for the museum over the years. And between last November and April, Legris spent about 40 hours of painstaking labour fixing the artwork.
According to Legris, the painting had undergone numerous restorations over the years, with certain areas being selectively cleaned at various times. This was likely because of the high costs associated with art restoration, meaning family members may have attempted to touch up the work themselves. So while parts of the girls’ faces were in decent condition, there was still considerable damage elsewhere.
“If I put an ultraviolet light up to that painting, you would see all the retouching,” Legris says. “There’s nothing hiding the fact that it’s been restored. It’s very easy to see.”
The girls were painted by the relatively unknown American artist Moses Pierce. According to a Bytown newsletter, Pierce once gave art lessons to Joseph Légaré, who is now considered to be one of Canada’s most important early painters.
The piece was donated to the museum in 1936 by the estate of Georgianna Pierce, an Ottawa resident and granddaughter of both John McLeod and Pierce, the artist. Grant Vogl, Bytown’s collections and exhibitions manager, thinks the painting was made in the 1840s since the two families were brought together through a marriage in 1842. And according to a biography from historian Sylvia Van Kirk, his sudden death from cholera in 1849 left the family in rough financial shape.
After trudging through old census records, Vogl learned that Annie had been a school teacher in Ottawa. However, little information on Mary could be found. The museum had previously publicized her name as Amelia, but Vogl’s research recently unearthed the fact that she was actually named Mary.
“It goes to show that we’re learning new things every day,” Vogl says. “It’s opportunities such as this that lead us to do more research and beef up the records.”
The museum allocates a small amount of its annual budget towards conservation. However, the portrait’s severe condition prompted officials to ask for donations.
“We tried to do a crowdsourcing campaign, and we did raise probably 15 per cent of the total through donors, which is admirable,” Vogl says regarding the overall $5,000 cost. “It’s a hard thing to do sometimes because it is so costly, but people also need to see an end product.”
With one painting successfully restored, Vogl is hoping the interest could lead to more donations in the future.
“It shows the work can be done and it’s an example from our collection that people can grab onto,” he says.
But since Vogl and Legris decided to not cover the artwork in glass for the packed museum, it won’t be on display anytime soon. Vogl expects that the work will be shown at Bytown’s 100th anniversary exhibition event in 2017 – which also happens to be the year Canada will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of Confederation.