Romancing the Canoe in Calgary

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Frederick N. Wilson, “Coyote Went Up the River (detail),” no date

Collection of Glenbow

Although we now consider canoes to be recreational vehicles, they have an age-old history that begins with the First Nations. Constructed from natural materials such as birch bark, canoes were a vital form of transportation as they were much faster than hiking through brush and clambering over rocks.

They were quickly adopted by European explorers as far back as Samuel de Champlain, who arrived near what is Tadoussac, Que., in 1603, and also played a vital role in the subsequent fur trade and colonization of Canada.

Thus, Romancing the Canoe, on view at the Glenbow in Calgary until Sept. 10, is timely, both as a summer show and as yet another marker of Canada’s 150th anniversary.

Curator Roger Boulet pulled works – mostly paintings, though the show includes a vintage birch-bark canoe “in wonderful condition” – from the Glenbow’s storage vaults, and borrowed other pieces from private collectors in Calgary, along with some from other institutional collections.

He chose a roughly chronological approach, but structured the exhibition around a handful of key themes. “It’s kind of intuitive,” he says of his curatorial approach. “It’s not all kind of rational and calculated. You go with what’s there. You have a couple of ideas and you see what’s possible.”

Early Europeans were impressed by how easy it was to manoeuvre canoes. “They marvelled at the design, speed and versatility,” says Boulet. The canoe became the vehicle of choice for fur traders who plied waterways into the interior of the continent. Frances Anne Hopkins, who traveled by canoe in the mid-1800s through the Great Lakes with her husband, Edward, a Hudson’s Bay Company official, is known for her paintings of voyageurs. Canoe Party Around a Campfire, painted in 1870, shows men using light from a torch to inspect an upturned canoe for damage that might need repair.

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Frances Anne Hopkins, “Canoe Party Around a Campfire,” 1870

Collection of Library and Archives Canada

The show includes a section about the dugout canoe, used by Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest. Those canoes, hollowed out from the trunks of red cedars, were built to withstand heavy seas. A large canoe could carry five tons of cargo as well as 10 paddlers and a steersman.

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Belmore Browne, “The Silent Fjord (detail),” 1936

Collection of Glenbow

Another section traces the evolution of the canoe from its role as a working craft to an object of recreation, romance and nostalgia in more recent times as reflected by Alberta artist Janice Tanton’s, Undercurrents, a 2014 meditation on national identity.

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Janice Tanton, "Undercurrents," 2014

courtesy of the artist

“The canoe continues to be a powerful Canadian symbol,” Boulet writes in an information panel. “For some artists, it is the expression of a link between the artist and nature. For others, it serves as a symbolic link with a wilderness that is synonymous with Canadian cultural history. The canoe is the hyphen between culture and nature. It is also part of the landscape.”