Browse "Visual Art"

The history of Indigenous art in Canada begins sometime during the last Ice Age between 80,000 and 12,000 years ago. To date, however, the oldest surviving artworks (excluding finely crafted, aesthetically significant stone tools) are datable to no earlier than 5,000 years ago.

Alternative media provide a range of perspectives and ideas that are not necessarily available in the profit-driven media products and outlets that dominate the Canadian mediascape. They include traditional media forms, such as books, newspapers, magazines, television, radio and film, as well as nontraditional and so-called “new media” forms such as zines and online publications and podcasts. Some definitions also include street theatre, murals, postering and culture jamming.

Objects of curiosity as well as of conquest, the Indigenous people of the New World were first depicted on maps by illustrators who had no direct knowledge of their subject.

The following article is an editorial written by The Canadian Encyclopedia staff. Editorials are not usually updated. Canadian painting in the 19th century tended towards the pastoral. It depicted idyllic scenes of rural life and represented the country as a wondrous Eden. Canadian painter Homer Watson, under the influence of such American masters as Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt, created images that are serene and suffused with golden light. In On the Mohawk River (1878), for instance, a lazy river ambles between tall, overhanging trees; in the background is a light-struck mountain. In Watson’s world, nature is peaceful, unthreatening and perhaps even sacred.

​The Art Association of Montreal, the forerunner of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, was founded in 1860.

Art Conservation and Restoration, see Conservation of Movable Cultural Property.

Art dealers in Canada have served as art dealers everywhere, not only as sellers of art but as tastemakers. Since they act as a link between the work of art and the art-buying public, they have an important role in the identification of who is important in Canadian art.

William Berczy, circa 1781-82, watercolour (courtesy NGC). Art Education Art Education is a term that has referred historically to the intensive training given to artists for professional or personal purposes. The three principal contexts for this instruction have been within the apprenticeship system, in specialized institutions such as art academies or art schools, and, more recently,...

 The earliest printed image relating to Canada is a bird's-eye view of Hochelaga and environs, published by Giovanni Ramusio in Venice in 1556.

Art Writing and Criticism date for the most part from the 1950s.

The history of visual artists' groups in Canada is filled with short-lived societies which have had a major influence on both professional and amateur artists.

Public building opened 22 May 1967. It was designed by Cummings and Campbell of St John's and Lebensold, Affleck, their Montreal associates, with acoustic design by Russell Johnson Associates.

Major Atlantic Canadian artists represented in the permanent collection include Mary Pratt and Christopher Pratt, Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak, Tom Forrestall, Alex Colville, Avery Shaw, Fred Ross, Jack Humphrey and Miller Brittain.

Birch-bark biting is the art of dentally perforating designs on intricately folded sheets of paper-thin bark. Traditionally, the technique is known to have been practised by Ojibwe (or Chippewa), Cree and other Algonquian peoples who used birchbark extensively in fabricating domestic containers, architectural coverings, canoes and pictographic scrolls. Indigenous artists have kept the practice alive in spite of colonial efforts to culturally assimilate Indigenous peoples into Canadian society. (See also History of Indigenous Art in Canada and Contemporary Indigenous Art in Canada.)

Canadian Prime Ministers as Seen by Their Loyal Cartoonists