In the watercolour, a log raft the size of a farmer's field swings ponderously around a rocky point. Three patchwork sails of reddish colour, dwarfed by the size of the raft, help move it and a crew of about 40 men down the river. There's a cook tent and, oddly enough, a totemic spruce tree about 10 metres tall has been erected in the middle.
"I had never seen such a graphic illustration of a timber raft," says National Archives of Canada director Ian Wilson. "It may become another icon of Canada, along with the canoe."
The watercolour, painted around 1870 by an amateur but highly skilled artist named Frances Anne Hopkins, has lain for the past 40 years in the overstuffed filing cabinets of a gentleman named Peter Winkworth.
A wealthy Canadian who has lived in London since the 1940s, Winkworth made it his business after the war to poke around the country houses of England and purchase any paintings or lithographs of historic Canada he could find.
And there was quite a bit to find, since many of the early explorers of Canada were financed by English entrepreneurs. The sketches and watercolours dashed off on these trips were sent "home" by way of proof that the investors' money was not being wasted. Once looked at and filed away in an album, many were scarcely glanced at for a century or more.
Winkworth quietly amassed a collection of 3,300 early lithographs, 700 watercolours and drawings, and a scattering of oil paintings. Early last month, ailing from the effects of a recent stroke, he sold the bulk of the collection to Ottawa's National Archives for $6-million.
It was a lot of money for the archives, which by its nature usually receives gifts of historic material and isn't set up to pay hard cash. A parliamentary appropriation was necessary.
But, as Wilson points out, the Winkworth collection would have sold for much more had it been broken up at auction. "It took years of patient building of a relationship to acquire it intact. It wasn't a question of money for Peter, it was a question of whether to sell at all. He enjoyed it, he had great pleasure building it.
"In the end, for him, the clincher was that he wanted the collection kept together. And we could promise to do that."
The collection has arrived so recently in the archives' vaults in Gatineau, Que., that the staff has only just finished opening the boxes and glancing to see what's inside.
"Basically we wanted to make sure it was all there," says Jim Burant, a curator who did much of the negotiating with Winkworth. "When I looked at the watercolours, they took my breath away. . . . Some of Peter's stuff never saw the light of day. That's why the colours are so good."
Archivists are always frustrated in trying to explain their excitement to the general public. These modest artworks, by their nature, aren't very interesting to art critics or galleries.
"They weren't on the aesthetic radar of art institutions," Burant says. "These are not 'fine' artists. So Frances Anne Hopkins wasn't bought by the Art Gallery of Ontario until 1992."
For a long time, only the archivists cared about this kind of work. They knew that humble sketches and watercolours are very often the only surviving record of things which don't exist any more.
On a long table in a room on the vault's top floor is a selection of Winkworth watercolours that has just been laid out for examination. One shows the interior of what it calls "an Indian lodge" in British Columbia, and is dated 1864. "Some historical-monuments people were here a few weeks ago and were amazed [by the picture]" Wilson says, especially "the architectural details. They had never seen such an image before."
An unsigned watercolour from an early Arctic voyage, dated 1829, shows an Inuit woman floating just offshore on an inflated walrus hide. She holds a double-bladed paddle in one hand and an arrow, apparently her fishing implement, in the other. She wears fur trousers, and children frolic on the shore behind her. Ironically, an engraving of this image appeared in a German magazine 10 years later.
It shows how quickly historical accuracy can be lost. The engraver endowed the Inuit fisherwoman with striped cotton trousers, and put non-existent mountains in the background. "He probably didn't know what fur pants were," Burant says succinctly.
It was Burant who began to cultivate a relationship with Winkworth six years ago. This was crucial to the archives' success, because it was competing with the McCord Museum in Montreal, which specializes in Canadian history and already had a relationship with Winkworth.
Wilson feels the archives' success had something to do with its state-of-the-art preservation building, constructed five years ago in Gatineau, across the river from Ottawa. Huge concrete vaults with temperature and humidity controls are surmounted by a floor where conservators use computer scanning equipment to digitally record drawings and prints. "Densimometers" periodically measure the pigment density in paintings to ensure they are not fading. The structure was built to last 500 years, the kind of lordly time frame that warms a collector's heart.
Since Winkworth's stroke, it is difficult for him to give interviews, and in any event he has never sought publicity. Born in 1929, he comes from a wealthy family that lived in Quebec for many generations. When he was around 20 he moved to England to work in financial consulting, but shortly afterward was involved in a serious sporting accident in which he lost a leg.
During his convalescence he began to study Canadiana seriously, and soon became a full-time collector. By the 1960s, when Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum began to collect similar material, he was already well established.
"When I started to work in the area of Canadian art, we would compete sometimes at auctions," recalls Mary Allodi, the ROM's long-time curator of Canadiana. "I can remember having fights with him on the phone. I'd say, Will you back down from bidding? and he'd say, No, I won't. Sometimes we'd have to agree to split the lot afterwards." She describes him as "a very private man, slight and distinguished looking, even before he grew his beard."
Burant paid many visits to Winkworth's home in central London, where he lives with his wife and daughter. It is a comfortable, detached house with servants. But it was bursting at the seams with the collection.
"In his house he had things stored in drawers," Burant recalls. "Everything for Quebec would be in one drawer." The drawers "were so full they were hard to open." It became a priority to remove the watercolours to protect them from fraying and crushing.
"He is a great collector," Burant says, "but he was eccentric about the way he stored things."
Winkworth's journeys across Britain in search of Canadiana began at least 20 years before Canadian museums began to interest themselves in this kind of material. He discovered that English country houses, many still inhabited by families that had sponsored the exploration of Canada two centuries ago, were a trove of Canadiana. In many cases the current residents had benignly neglected the old albums and filing cabinets, which inadvertently protected the works from light and handling. "One English woman had lived in her house for 50 years and never opened the albums," Burant says.
Because he was a perfectionist, Winkworth would look at a lithograph even where he already had a copy of it. If it was better than the one in his possession he would buy it. "He wanted the best," Burant says. "But even his worst ones are better than the best in other museums."
The artistic quality of the work is highly variable. There's a clumsy 1824 Quebec print of a lumber ship called the Columbus being launched. But there is also an exquisite drawing by the German artist Johann Hermann Carmiencke, who visited Canada in 1851 and sketched the Chaudière Falls in coloured crayon and pencil.
A lot of the artists were women. At a time when they were barred from the professions, talented women often opened a drawing academy and in many cases were the only full-time artist working in a particular town or region.
They often lived and died in obscurity. One Halifax artist, Mary McKie, made meticulous watercolours of Mi'kmaq Indians. "But I don't know anything about her," Burant says, "except that she was active from 1840 to 1862."
Later this summer, the archives hopes to have a show of Winkworth art at its headquarters near the Parliament buildings. But the bulk of the art, the little informal sketches of soldiers skirmishing at Batoche, or a missionary priest's hasty watercolour of the still-empty hill country in northern Saskatchewan, will probably remain in tidy boxes inside a concrete vault. They will only be seen by the occasional historian or television producer in quest of historical imagery.
Ian Wilson admits it's frustrating that "the archives are always in the background. It's a headache figuring out how to let people know that Pierre Berton used the archives, or that 66 per cent of the images in the CBC's book about its history series came from here."
But it also has its occasional joys, and the arrival of the Winkworth collection is one of them. "I thought I knew the imagery of Canada," Wilson says. "But nobody has ever really seen this collection before, and it was thrilling to be one of the first."