9
The Artist and Collector
Van Horne had a deep love of beauty and art. As a small child, he had drawn pictures on the whitewashed walls of the family home in Chelsea, Illinois. In later life, whenever time permitted, he got out his brushes and tubes and painted a picture — one of his favourite pursuits. At Covenhoven he built a large, well-lit studio in which he produced realistic, somewhat ethereal landscapes, rich in browns and yellows. Often these canvases were inspired by the woods, fields, and shores all around him on Minister’s Island.
A rapid painter, Van Horne would frequently complete his canvases — usually large oils — in a single evening from notes he made earlier in the day. He did not labour over his work or spend much time thinking about it in advance because he believed that great art resulted from feeling, not intellect. As he expressed it, “There is no place for intellect in art. Art is wholly a matter of feeling. As intellect enters art goes out…. All of the great artists who acquired temporary fame but subsequently lost the esteem of the world were intellectual. Many of the great artists have been weak-minded or lunatics, or sodden with drink or debauchery.” Commenting on the speed with which his friend painted, Robert Wickenden said, “Sir William wanted to paint by telegraph.” English-born Wickenden, besides being an artist himself, was also a printmaker, collector, dealer, historian, poet, and cataloguer. He probably met Van Horne for the first time in Montreal, where the Wickenden family lived briefly after moving there in 1900.
On one occasion some admiring friends were dumbfounded to learn that a large canvas depicting birch trees in their autumn glory had been completed in only eight hours and entirely indoors under artificial light. “Yes, but I know what a birch tree looks like,” replied Van Horne in response to their exclamations. “Why should I sit outside in the cold to do it? I know the dip of its branches; I know the curl of its leaves; I know the colour of it where the sun touches it in autumn.”
Van Horne signed most of his work with his initials, WCVH. Occasionally he substituted “Enroh Nav.” This ruse enabled him to indulge in one of his favourite jokes, passing off one of his paintings as either a masterpiece executed by a prominent artist or a work done by an insignificant one. Robert Paterson, a young Scot and an amateur artist, was probably among only a handful of viewers who was not completely taken in. When he visited Van Horne’s Montreal home, he stopped transfixed in front of a canvas signed Enroh Nav.
“Who’s this by?” he asked.
“Oh that’s by an artist of very little account,” his host replied.
“Yes, but it’s very clever — it reminds me of the work of L’Hermitte, the French landscape painter, but it’s signed Enroh Nav. Oh, it’s your own. By Jove, that’s good. I didn’t realize you were a painter — this has ability.” Van Horne chuckled, looked pleased, and with a “humph” passed on.
In Montreal, Van Horne painted in an immense attic studio lit by arc lights. Sometimes the studio was shared by his friend, the Canadian artist Percy Woodcock. According to Woodcock, Van Horne “painted as birds sing, as naturally and enjoyably. It was a form of relief to his creative faculties that were continually seeking an outlet.” When sketching outdoors at St. Andrews, Van Horne was sometimes accompanied by George Innes Sr., the American Romantic artist noted for the poetical, mystical landscapes of his later years. One of his choice subjects was Passamaquoddy Bay bathed in moonlight. Van Horne was inspired by the same scene, and he produced a work he entitled Moonlight on Passamaquoddy Bay. Although Van Horne loved to paint landscapes and found inspiration from one end of Canada to the other, the self-taught artist did not restrict himself to this genre. Occasionally he ventured into portraiture, sometimes without having his subject sit for him. He once did a portrait of Cléo de Mérode, the celebrated Parisian opera dancer, from photographs.
Van Horne’s work was decidedly uneven in quality. Nevertheless, there is no question that much of it was, in the words of his friend Roger Fry, the distinguished British art critic, “marvellously effective and on the spot.” Many decades later, in the 1970s, Halifax restorer and artist Robert Manuge commented that the best of the tycoon’s work was superb.
Given his love of art and his instinct for collecting, Van Horne quite naturally set out to build an art collection of his own, a hobby he shared with his rival railway magnate James Jerome Hill. Montreal, as Canada’s leading centre of commerce in these years, spawned its share of notable art collectors. In addition to Van Horne, they included such distinguished Canadians as his CPR colleagues Lord Strathcona and R.B. Angus, CPR construction boss James Ross, Charles Hosmer, president of Canadian Cottons and a Bank of Montreal director, the politician and financier George Drummond, and the financier Edward Black. There is no doubt, however, that Van Horne amassed the most outstanding art collection of his day in Canada.
Goaded by his insatiable curiosity and zeal for acquiring things, Van Horne seized every opportunity to study and purchase art. He built up a comprehensive library on art history, greedily absorbed details about the lives of his favourite artists, and scooped up coveted paintings on his many business trips to the world’s art centres. He purchased only works that he truly liked. As he once informed a Montreal friend, “A picture that you do not feel you really want is always an incubus and a source of dissatisfaction.”
It is likely that Van Horne began collecting art seriously in the mid-1880s, when he was living in Montreal and receiving a large salary from the CPR. Certainly by 1892 he had acquired enough confidence as a collector to begin cataloguing his most prized paintings in a notebook that is now in the archives of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. His collection featured works from the early Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish schools (Velázquez, Frans Hals, Rembrandt). It also boasted canvases by such eminent British painters as Hogarth, Turner, Reynolds, Constable, and Gainsborough. And, contrary to what has often been remarked about it, the collection also included many modern works; in fact, all but two of the forty-nine works listed in the 1892 catalogue were from the nineteenth century.
Van Horne distinguished himself by being not only the foremost Canadian collector of his day but also by being the only Montreal collector to buy works by post-impressionist artists. Timid Montreal collectors shied away from these paintings, but Van Horne was audacious enough to acquire works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the French graphic artist and poster designer; Mary Cassatt, America’s most famous female painter; and Paul Cézanne, the outstanding French painter.
Interestingly, Van Horne’s collection in 1892 contained works by several American artists. One of these was the most original and individualistic of the nineteenth-century Romantic painters, Albert Ryder. Van Horne became one of his most stalwart supporters, buying his work, promoting it to friends, and even entertaining the artist in his Montreal home. Van Horne’s patronage was not without its drawbacks, however. In their personal dealings, Ryder had to accept criticism and advice — an inevitable by-product of any relationship with the confident and outspoken Van Horne.
At a time when contemporary Canadian artists were shunned by other collectors, Van Horne was bold enough to invest in their work, including paintings by James Wilson Morrice, now considered one of this country’s most important artists of his era. In 1906 Van Horne paid what was then the generous sum of $100 for a study of an ox by Maurice Cullen, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy. After viewing Van Horne’s art collection in 1936, Toronto art critic Graham C. McInnes rated it as the finest private collection in Canada. McInnes, who championed the work of the Group of Seven as well as that of newer figurative artists, informed his Winnipeg Free Press readers that the Van Horne Collection’s “richness and variety almost take away one’s breath.”
Van Horne maintained extremely close ties with the Canadian art world during the closing years of his CPR career. As an honorary member of the Royal Canadian Academy, he attended its annual meetings and exhibition openings. He became actively involved in the Art Association of Montreal (later the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), and on December 13, 1901, he was elected its president. Although positively