Musings of a Family Archivist - A View From Inside the Cedar Chest

(Presentation at the Toronto Arts & Letters Club - October 8, 2014) Thank you for your very generous introduction. I feel quite awed and humbled to be standing here in the very room where Jefferys himself spent so much time. As one of the founding members, my grandfather was a passionate promoter of the Arts and Letters Club. He drew inspiration from his fellow members and was an enthusiastic mentor to others throughout his life. You may be quite familiar with Jefferys illustrative work and his historical writing, but he was also a very gifted lecturer, teacher and a bit of a philosopher. Throughout his career, he frequently gave presentations on a wide variety of topics to groups very much like you. I don't presume to be anywhere close to being the orator that he was but perhaps I can evoke his spirit in this location and on this occasion to help me out a bit.

(Presentation at the Lindsey Canadian Club - October 9, 2014)  - thank you for a very generous introduction. I am very pleased to have the opportunity this evening to speak to you. You may be quite familiar with Jefferys illustrative work and his historical writing, but he was also a very gifted lecturer, teacher and a bit of a philosopher. Throughout his career, he frequently gave presentations on a wide variety of topics to groups very much like you. I don't presume to be anywhere close to being the orator that he was but perhaps I can evoke his spirit in this location and on this occasion to help me out a bit.

I’d like to begin with a brief introduction to C. W. Jefferys for those of you who may not be very familiar with him or his work. This was printed in the catalogue of the recent National Gallery show titled “Artists, Architects and Artisans: Canadian Art 1890 – 1918".

Painter, draughtsman, illustrator and designer C.W. Jefferys arrived in Canada around 1878, apprenticed at the Toronto Lithographing Company (1885-90) and studied with George A. Reid (1886-88) and at the New York Art Students' League (1894). He was a leading figure in the Toronto Art Students' League (1888-1904), worked as an illustrator for Toronto papers and the New York Herald (1892-1900), and was the art director and chief cartoonist for The Moon (1902-03). He accompanied the Canadian tour of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall in 1901 when he first painted the prairie landscape and covered Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s western tour in 1911. He painted murals and designed stained glass and was a prolific book illustrator. He taught in the Department of Architecture at the University of Toronto 1912-39, Ontario College of Art 1921-27 and was a member of the Ontario Society of Artists (1902, President 1913-18), Graphic Arts Club (first President 1903-04), Arts and Crafts Society of Canada (1903), Arts and Letters Club (founding member 1908, President 1924-26), the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (Associate 1912; Academician 1925), Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour (founding member 1925; President 1928-31).

I chose to title of my presentation - "Musings of a Family Archivist - A View From Inside the Cedar Chest" for a couple of reasons.

First of all, many of the letters, sketches, and other ephemera that I refer to in this presentation did, in fact, reside in such a repository for a long time. Cedar chests might be considered an anachronism by today’s standards, but to an earlier generation, they were held in high esteem. Typically they were the repository for a bride’s dowery - a place to safely store and preserve a lifetime of personal keepsakes to be treasured and kept for the benefit of future generations.

Secondly, I consider the cedar chest to be an appropriate metaphor for the institutions we build as a society to store and preserve our National Heritage. Our appreciation for the history of our country and the development our society is measured and celebrated by the art, literature and artefacts that we deem to be significant and valuable enough to save for posterity.

While it is true that these repositories effectively store and preserve the physical artefacts themselves, the ability to access them for research and enjoyment often falls short of our expectations in our digital world.

At one time the location of all of C.W. Jefferys work may have been reasonably easy to determine. However, this has become problematic because of the distribution of family artefacts and ephemera throughout the generations. The original CWJ estate consisted of a lifetime accumulation of paintings, drawings, manuscripts, letters, and other documents. A significant portion of it was purchased by Imperial Oil shortly after his death and eventually was passed on to the National Archives and the balance was distributed equally among his five surviving daughters. They have now all died and their portion of the legacy has either been distributed amongst their children or donated and added to other “cedar chests”. And even this does not take into consideration the huge amount of work that exists in other galleries, personal collections or has been lost for other reasons. Either way, the artefacts continue to be spread further and further afield.

 

One person who recognized and appreciated the considerable value of these items was my cousin Robert Stacey. Throughout his career as an art historian, curator and author, Bob published several books and articles about Jefferys and his contemporaries. Bob’s prodigious knowledge of Canadian art history was legendary and he was the acknowledged GOTO guy when it came to Jefferys and his contemporaries. Bob collected and indexed a huge amount of information about Jefferys from a wide variety of sources including members of the Jefferys family, various galleries, archives, and other collectors of CWJ’s work.  His ultimate goal was to publish the definitive book about the life and work of Jefferys but unfortunately, he died before he was able to realize his vision. His mountain of research material now resides in the ‘Cedar Chests’ of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the National Archives in Ottawa.

My mother, Barbara Jefferys Allen was the youngest of Charles W. Jefferys’ five daughters. Over her lifetime, she collected and preserved in her cedar chest a treasury of items consisting of hundreds of personal letters, photographs, books, news articles, drawings and other ephemera. These artefacts describe a history that spans a period of at least 150 years and several generations including but not exclusively, the life and times of her father, C.W. Jefferys. Most of these items at first blush, seem to be of limited interest to anyone except perhaps the immediate family.

About 7 years ago, my mother at age 92 was finding it increasingly difficult to continue living on her own and had to be moved into an extended care centre. It was at that time, that I took over stewardship of the cedar chest, its’ contents having grown substantially with the addition of photocopies of much of Bob’s research material. Many other containers of family photographs, paintings, drawings, books and other items have now taken up residence in our home.

(Image: Front Page of cwjefferys.ca website)

In order to share this bounty with the world, I started to develop the cwjefferys.ca website. I envisioned that it would become “The Source of All Things C. W. Jefferys” and proclaimed a vision of “tapping into all available resources to create a comprehensive online archive of the Jefferys legacy providing easy access to this treasure of Canadian heritage.” The mission is to digitize and present his images, transcribe and publish his written work and provide any available attribution information and references to other sources – a sort of online “Catalogue Raisonne” – for the purposes of research and education. The sheer volume of information and source material that has come my way since has been staggering, but with the help and support of family and friends, I hope to continue the process.

The best thing about web publishing vs print is that there is no limit to the amount that you can publish.

The worst thing about web publishing vs. print is that there is no limit to the amount that you can publish.

Jefferys lifetime creative output was incredibly large and diverse and it is impossible to present more than a brief overview in such a short time. The best I can do is to present a broad swath of items some of which many of you will immediately recognize and you may even enjoy a case of the “warm fuzzies” as they resonate in your memories of high school social studies. Others may not be as familiar but you will probably recognize his style. And still, others will be totally new as they have resided in one those cedar chests for so many years and are just now getting aired out.

Born in England, Jefferys grew up in Rochester in the neighbourhood where Charles Dickens lived. In his words: "My father, like all old residents of Chatham, Rochester and Strood, knew Dickens, and was known by him. I may have been seen by him and there may be truth in the family tradition that I sat on his knee. It is just possible, but if so, I can scarcely be expected to remember it, since he died in 1870, the year after I was born.”

I remember very vividly, however, walking with my father over the Medway bridge and up Gad's Hill, and my father pointing to the house set back from the road and saying that’s where Mr Dickens lived.

I began to realize that I've been an illustrator of history for a long time. At school, I found the history lessons easy and could always answer with copious inaccuracy the questions on the history examination papers. For the unfortunate examiners who had to plod through my ramblings and voluminous papers, I have often felt in later years an acute and sincere sympathy. The only prises I ever won were for history, or geography or English composition: these were always thirds, never firsts; which seems to indicate either that my teachers recognized persevering industry, or realized that nothing much could be done about an obstinate case like mine. Apparently, I could not help myself, the brand was on me. Whenever the classroom was to be dressed up for closing exercises and the like, I was called upon to decorate the blackboard with pictures of the…

Landing of Julius Caesar

The Battle of Queenston Heights,

or Wolfe at Quebec. My school-fellows crowded me with commissions to illustrate their books: I established a fixed scale of prices, and English history, I think was two cents, a Canadian, one cent. My masterpiece was an illustrated Algebra, for which as a subject, I detested, and as lying outside my legitimate field, I exacted five cents. It was a solitary Tour de Force.

(Image: Toronto At Student League NDSL)

Jefferys was a member of the Toronto Art Students' League which subscribed to the motto of 'non clamor sed amor' (Not loudness but love). ..

(Image: NDSL)

What a wonderful aspiration to live by – unassuming but with passion. Within the organization was the smaller N.D.S.L. Club created in 1891 by Robert Holmes.

(Image: More NDSL)

The sub-section required its members to satisfy the requirements of 'nulla dies sine linea' or 'never a day without a line', which reinforced the goals and beliefs held by the league overall.

(Image: Toronto Art Student League Calendars)

The Toronto Art Students’ League published these wonderful calendars for several years. It is believed the project was initiated as a suggestion by Jefferys in order to showcase the efforts of the members. Throughout his career, much of his work was published in calendars of various formats.

(Image: Toronto Art Student League Calendars)

(Image: Toronto Art Student League Calendars)

(Image: Rebels Drilling in North York)

Included in those calendars were his familiar historical sketches such as Rebels Drilling in North York and…

(Image: The Prairie - 1903)

The Prairie published in the 1903 edition.

(Image: New York Herald)

In the fall of 1892, he left Toronto for New York, to join the staff of the New York Herald.

He writes “ in the golden age of illustration, the period before the camera ousted the pen of the draughtsman. The depiction of the crowded life of the present - fires, political meetings, murder trials, social happenings, strikes, ceremonials, riots - was a startling and unwelcome change from the romantic imaginings of the past…

(Image: New York Herald Poster - 1897)

But we were then in the depression of the early nineties, and the daily or Sunday newspaper was almost the only field open to a young man trying to make a living with his pen, and to get a foothold in illustration…

(Image: New York Herald)

And before long it dawned on me that here was the very best training for the job that I wanted to do. I realized that yesterday was as alive as today and that the accurate and intensive observation of how people acted now and here was the best way to understand how they acted in the past. It was a simple lesson, but for me, it was almost a revelation and thenceforth, in imagination if not execution, my dead men and women were no longer dead.”

(Image: Sous le Cap, Sep 3, 1889)

I learned much, and enjoyed much of my life in New York; it was altogether a fruitful experience. Picture galleries, libraries, museums, great drama and music were there but New York also clearly revealed to me the fact that my roots were in Canada. Every holiday struck the roots wider and deeper, and I began to wonder whether I should ever make whatever native growth was in me anywhere else and at last, I came back. I don't regret it.

During many of those holidays, he spent time sketching and painting in Quebec and southern Ontario. Here are a few examples of that work.

(Image: Quebec, 1889)

(Image: Stooks of Grain, 1906)

Jefferys fell in love with the prairies soon after returning to Canada and made several trips west capturing the essence of the land in a manner that had not previously been done by other artists. He drew inspiration for many of his historical works as well on those trips.

(Image: Qu’appelle Valley)

(Image: Order of Good Cheer)

Here are a few Jefferys images which I am sure many of you will be familiar with.

I have very fond memories of the Order of Good Cheer – It was prominently displayed in our family dining room.

(Image: Brock’s Ride to Queenston)

Brock’s Ride to Queenston. Notice in these two different views, that Jefferys has added a heightened sense of drama by changing the shape of Brock’s cape.

(Image: Founding of Halifax, 1749)

The stamp on the right containing Jefferys image of the Founding of Halifax was published in 1949 on the 200th anniversary

(Image: Founding of Toronto)

(Image: Champlain on the Ottawa, 1613)

(Image: Martyrdom of Brebeuf and Lalemant)

(Image: March of the Rebels Down Yonge Street)

Destined to be re-purposed as the label on a great beer.

(Image: Battle of Batoche)

(Image: Battle of Lundy’s Lane)

A gold coin was recently designed after the Jefferys image of the Battle of Lundy’s Lane.

(Image: Willow Creek, 1915)

Jefferys was a masterful watercolour artist. These two works are part of the National Gallery's collection.

(Image: La Verendrye Brothers)

Here is an interesting pair of images. At first glance, it appears that one is the mirror image of the other – sort of like viewing a slide that that is being projected from the wrong side. But upon closer inspection, you will see that they are actually quite different. The ground cover is different, the mountains in the distant are not the same as well as several other things. The painting on the left is the one that is most common, having been published in volume 1 of the Picture Gallery series and in the Thomas Nelson series of prints that may have been displayed in your social studies classroom. The painting on the right is in one of the family collections. Jefferys often painted the same scene several times and it is difficult to determine which came first but why he decided to switch viewpoints, in this case, remains a mystery.

(Image: Homage to the Chaudiere, 1930)

Some images may seem familiar but they haven’t been seen for a while. This is a mural that was once in the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa and is now in the vault of the National Archive.

(Image: Christmas Street Scene Toronto)

Illustrations such this were common in the Toronto Star, or the Globe and Mail. It is difficult to put a number on the volume of illustration and cartoons that he drew but it would easily number in the thousands. Unfortunately, newspaper illustration tends to have a very short lifespan so they are not usually as memorable as his other mediums.

(Image: Invocation to Kee Way Din)

I feel a personal attachment to Invocation to Kee Way Din. I recall it being hung just inside our front door when I was growing up. He was there to greet visitors when they came in and bless them on there way out.

(Image: Troops at Petawawa, 1919)

Jefferys was one of the several artists commissioned during WWI to paint for the war effort

(Image: Clock Peddler)

From a series of drawings Jefferys did to illustrate T.C. Haliburton’s character, Sam Slick.

(Image: The Jester, 1937)

And here are a few images some which you likely have not seen before...

(Image: Carnival)

Carnival – probably used as an early illustration for the Canadian Magazine.

(Image: Crucified Thief)

(Image: Stained Glass Windows)

Jefferys designed these wonderful stained glass windows and his brother Walter executed them. They were originally located in a Toronto residence. When my parents learned that the house was being demolished, they purchased them, shipped them out west and installed them in our house. They have since been removed and are currently being restored.

(Image: Kingston Road, 1937)

Jefferys had been working on illustrations for a book about the history of the old Kingston Road.

(Image: Kingston Road – Aug 6, 1933)

My mother worked alongside – his pen and ink on the left, her watercolour wash on the right – same scene, same day

(Image: Uncle Jim’s Canadian Nursery Rhymes)

Uncle Jim’s Canadian Nursery Rhymes, illustrated by Jefferys and published in 1908, was the first Canadian colour illustrated children’s book. Strangely enough, it was published and distributed only in Britain.

(Image: Self Expression, 1920)

The subject of Jefferys relationship with the Group of Seven is interesting. His friendship and admiration for J.E.H. McDonald is well documented and he enjoyed the friendship of all of them. The group often met and commiserated on the front lawn of the Jefferys home in York Mills. According to the biography written by William Colgate, CWJ was invited to join the group but turned the offer down. My mother indicated to me that from his perspective, he felt that the group’s vision was too constricted. He sympathized with their effort to create a style of art that reflected the uniquely Canadian landscape but ultimately his vision was not their vision.

Jefferys published this illustration in 1920 right around the same time as the first show by the Group. I wonder if he is expressing his opinion about landscape painting in general or if he was making a pointed statement directed at the vision that the Group of Seven aspired to. By the way, I’d be very interested to know if satironograph is an actual word or if Jefferys made it up.

(Image: Letter)

Jefferys was a prodigious letter writer – corresponding with his wife and children when he was away on trips. In this particular letter to his wife Callie, dated August 15, 1924, he is making comments about his last expedition to western Canada. He has spent the past several weeks sketching and gathering historical notes in Southern Alberta and has taken a few days rest in Jasper Park Lodge. His comments:

“Jasper is no place to paint, though doubtless somewhere within the limits of the park there are good subjects. Harris and Jackson are not overly enthusiastic though they found some material above the timberline near Maligne Lake but they characterize much of the landscape as picture postcard type.

This is true, though scarcely fair to the scenery which after all, exists for other purposes than O.S.A. exhibitions.“

(Image: A Prairie Town)

Jefferys preferred the vast blue sky and rolling prairie for his subject matter and the fruit of his journey on this trip included this large oil titled “A Prairie Town”.

(Image: Maligne Lake, 1924 (Harris))

And the result of Harris’s visit, despite his seemingly unenthusiastic perspective, was this.

(Image: Indian Portraits)

Jeffreys received many honours and accolades during his lifetime including an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Queens University in 1931. However, the one he most valued was when he was inducted into the clan of Mohawks of the Six Nations Indians near Brantford.

(Image: Musings of a Family Archivist – A View From Inside the Cedar Chest)

Perhaps you are familiar with the premise that if you put a frog in a pot of hot water, it will have the sense to jump out immediately to save itself. However, if you put him into a pot of cool water and gradually turn up the heat, it will happily sit there until it is cooked to death. Growing up in the shadow of the Jefferys legacy was somewhat akin to the frog in the cool water. We were surrounded by his landscapes and historical images and had easy access to his books and often enjoyed listening to my mother’s stories of growing up in the Jefferys household. My siblings may have a different opinion but I must admit that I had become quite complacent it all over the years.

That attitude changed dramatically when I began to dig into the contents of the cedar chest. I am now the frog steeped in hot water but, unlike the frog, I have no desire to jump away. Instead, I am incentivised to dig deeper, discover and re-invent my understanding of this genius of a man. It is intimidating to consider the huge output of CWJ’s work including illustrations, drawings, paintings, letters, manuscripts, lectures, etc. and I have developed a profoundly deep appreciation for the task that Bob Stacey set himself to. Reading letters by Jefferys to his family, friends and associates expressing his joys, sorrows and passion for his work, the unpublished manuscripts written in handwriting that was as graphic and confident as his illustrations, the serendipitous connections and insights that are made by sorting letters, articles and other ephemera into chronological order thus presenting them in a different context – all of this makes for a very heady and fascinating stew to be cooked in.

There is so much of the influence of C.W. Jefferys in Canada that his reputation as a Great Canadian is assured. One of his finest attributes is his unassuming naturalness. We know that he was most thorough in all his work, that he engaged in meticulous research in preparation for his illustrations. Yet in the preface to his "Picture Gallery of Canadian History", he indicated that he would welcome anyone pointing out any errors that he might have made. He truly believed in his subject. Possibly he best sums up his worthy objective in his own observation on his historical illustrations: "If they visualize in some degree the life of our past and arouse our interest in the common heritage of our country's history, their main purpose will be fulfilled..“

Jefferys died 63 years ago today. A few hours later I made my way into this world. I like to think that somewhere in heaven our souls were together in those few hours and he shared some of his artistic sensibility and wisdom. I occasionally muse about what it would have been like to have had my grandfather around when I was young. It would have been wonderful to sit and listen to him regale his adventures and insights about the history of our country.

But then, I can. After all, the purpose of this project is in fact to do just that.