A COLLECTOR’S EYE, AN ENDURING LEGACY
Collecting ‘curios’ was a popular pastime in the Victorian era, but Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt took it to new heights — and saved a crucial piece of the country’s heritage, Randy Boswell writes in his weekly series on this remarkable 19th-century Ottawan.
There’s an elegantly shaped, elaborately decorated clay cooking pot — handmade in Eastern Ontario about 500 years ago by a St. Lawrence Iroquois woman — waiting today in Tulsa, Oklahoma for its next moment in the spotlight on a history-making tour of American art museums.
The earthenware vessel is one of about 120 objects, all drawn from the finest collections in North America, being showcased in the first-ever major U.S. exhibition dedicated to celebrating the timeless artistry of Indigenous women, past and present.
Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists has created a sensation in the U.S. after recent shows at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the First Art Museum in Nashville and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.
It’s not just the exhibit’s novel thematic focus that’s gaining the attention of the continent’s cultural community; it’s also the groundbreaking way it was assembled in the four-year lead-up to last year’s launch, with curators taking direction from an all-female, all-Indigenous panel of artist-experts in a way that “could help overturn patriarchal attitudes that resonate in the mainstream art world,” according to The New York Times.
Despite disruptions to the tour caused by the COVID -19 pandemic, the Canadian masterpiece of contact-era Iroquoian pottery will be on display again from October to January, alongside paintings, sculptures and other creations ancient and modern, at Tulsa’s renowned Philbrook Museum of Art.
The pot, likely also used for hauling water and storing food, was found in a Lanark County cave west of Ottawa in the mid-1800s. It was made around the time French explorer Jacques Cartier fatefully encountered the St. Lawrence Iroquois at present-day Quebec City (Stadacona) and Montreal (Hochelaga) in the 1530s — when they used the word “kanata” to designate their village, but Cartier took it to mean all of “Canada.”
A historical treasure? The old pot is off the charts. It’s on loan to Hearts of Our People from Montreal’s McCord Museum, but if it weren’t for Edward Van Cortlandt — the eccentric old doctor from 19th-century Ottawa, an obsessive collector who created this city’s first museum in his Wellington Street home — it might never have survived to become part of a landmark exhibition in the 21st.
The earliest indication of Van Cortlandt’s acquisitive impulses is a Bytown Gazette news item from June 1843 that reported his discovery and excavation of an “Indian burying ground” along the shore of the Ottawa River.
There’s much more to be said about the find, a deeply symbolic moment in the city’s history — as well as an act of grave-robbing with reverberations to the present day. But the bones of about 20 ancient Indigenous people, along with other objects dug up at the site, were “now in the possession of Dr. V. Cortlandt, Bytown, and who will be thankful for any similar relics.”
This may have been the beginning of a personal museum that would gain Van Cortlandt considerable acclaim in the decades to come.
The collecting of “curios” was a popular pastime in the Victorian era amid surging interest in both history and the natural world. Van Cortlandt’s passion for collecting was no doubt fuelled during his years of medical training in England. From 1829 to 1832, he was the live-in clerk and librarian of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a historic square where both The Hunterian medical history collection — (in)famous for its displays of human body parts — and architect-antiquarian Sir John
Soane’s celebrated household museum were mere steps away.
Van Cortlandt accumulated so many archaeological objects, fossils, stuffed animals, plant specimens, samples of Ottawa-area rocks and minerals and historical artifacts that his personal “cabinet of curiosities” was eventually bursting.
It formed the nucleus of an important July 1853 cultural and industrial exhibition that impressed visiting governor general Lord Elgin and helped make Ottawa (still named Bytown at the time) a serious contender to become Canada’s capital.
Meanwhile, Van Cortlandt served as curator of a series of educational organizations — the Silurian Society, the Bytown Mechanics’ Institute and Athenaeum, the Ottawa Natural History Society — that built their own collections, almost certainly drawing from and replenishing the doctor’s personal treasure trove.
Year by year, his collection grew. A cannonball here, a French sword there. A taxidermied turtle, a statue of Buddha and — could it be? — “a beautiful Aboriginal earthen vase,” as Van Cortlandt reported in an 1860 Citizen advertisement in which he lists more than a dozen newly acquired items and “returns his thanks” for the latest “donations to his Museum.”
The doctor’s fossil collection is known to have inspired the young Ottawa lawyer, Elkanah Billings, to devote his life to the study of primordial organisms and become Canada’s first official paleontologist.
Billings even named an extinct marine creature — Carabocrinus vancortlandti — after his mentor: “The species is dedicated to Dr. E. Vancortlandt, of the City of Ottawa, whose zeal in the advancement of science has been productive of many beneficial results,” Billings wrote in his 1859 opus, On the Crinoideae of the Lower Silurian Rocks of Canada.
“The only specimen known belongs to his cabinet, and has been kindly communicated by him to us for description.”
It’s clear that Van Cortlandt welcomed members of the public to see all his cool stuff, including the time in 1867 when he filled a tank of water with fish, which (as he stated in a letter to the Citizen) “may be seen at my house by anybody curious on the subject, desporting most happily and healthily in a very small drawing-room Aquavivarium.”
It wasn’t just locals who took notice. In 1858, one of the era’s leading Canadian intellectuals — Montreal geologist J.W. Dawson, principal of McGill College — delivered a lecture on Things to Be Observed in Canada by aspiring scholars, highlighting the collection “of Dr. Van Cortlandt, and of the Silurian Society of Ottawa” among the country’s top attractions.
Dawson’s lecture to the Natural History Society of Montreal likely prompted John Samuel McCord — a Montreal lawyer and former schoolmate of Van Cortlandt’s in Quebec City — to take his son, David, on a steamboat trip to Ottawa later that year.
“At the age of fourteen, David had an experience that may have marked his life forever,” former McCord Museum curator Moira McCaffrey wrote in a 1999 essay, recounting how, “as a reward for good conduct and prizes obtained in school,” the youngster was treated to a special viewing of Van Cortlandt’s cabinet.
David Ross McCord, evidently inspired by Van Cortlandt, would go on to form his own massive collection of Canadiana — eventually the basis of the McCord Museum, officially opened more than 60 years after the Ottawa trip.
Van Cortlandt died in 1875. His former possessions are now sprinkled across the collections of many institutions, including the Geological Survey of Canada, the Redpath Museum in Montreal and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
But remarkably, much of Van Cortlandt’s collection was acquired by Dawson for McGill’s natural history museum, before many of those objects were transferred first to the Redpath and then the McCord — opened in 1921 by its 77-year-old founder.
Among them was the St. Lawrence Iroquois clay pot.
A close-up photograph of the pot showing the intricate patterns etched into its rim and collar is featured prominently in the exhibition catalogue, labelled McCord artifact ACC1337 and identified as a “gift of Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt.”
In the accompanying text, McCaffrey — now executive director of the Ottawa-based Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization — describes the object as a superb example of the way “Indigenous women refined the complex art of pottery making over thousands of years,” using the still-soft clay of their creations as “an ideal canvas for artistic expression.”
From a Lanark County cave to Van Cortlandt’s parlour to a trio of Montreal museums, the Iroquoian pot has got around over the years.
It was even one of the items on display when The Spirit Sings exhibition opened at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum in 1988 — a historic and highly controversial show that sparked First Nations protests, an international boycott and fundamental changes to how museums in Canada and elsewhere showcase Indigenous artifacts and artworks.
In advance of the pot’s U.S. tour, as detailed in a lengthy museum blogpost, McCord curators and conservation experts spent weeks creating a three-dimensional digital model of the object and constructing a chemically inert polyethylene foam cushion and a specially reinforced packing crate to ensure the “precious cargo” would return safely from its trek across North America.
Carla Hemlock, a beadwork and textile artist from the Kahnawake Mohawk Nation near Montreal, was part of the advisory panel that oversaw the staging of Hearts of Our People and has one of her own pieces — an exquisitely designed 1800s-style coat, hat and purse ensemble — on display in the exhibit.
But she told one U.S. reviewer that the clay pot found near Ottawa more than 150 years ago is the “standout” for her among the artworks assembled for the show.
“To see that fragile pot survive hundreds of years — I compare it to our people, fragile yet strong, and how we’ve survived everything that’s been thrown at us,” said Hemlock. “The pot is still intact, just like our people are still intact.” Randy Boswell is an Ottawa writer and journalism professor at Carleton University. He’s writing a book about Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt and his times in 19th-century Ottawa.
NEXT: CSI: BYTOWN – ‘DR. VAN’ AND THE DAWNING DAYS OF FORENSIC SCIENCE IN CANADA