Hotel Vancouver (#2) Canadian Pacific luggage label circa 1920s, via ebay. Looks similar to this previous post, but features a slightly different perspective.
Vancouver Tourist Association advert signed by Ronald Jackson, 1946. From inside the souvenir program for The Jubilee Show, seen here yesterday. This advert also resembles his colour painting for the Tourist Association seen here previously.
Cityscape by David Lam, from an article featured in the June 1967 issue of Vancouver Life (and Western Homes). The article was titled “The Two Horizons of David Lam; He paints what sells to also paint for joy” and was written by Eileen Johnson. This is not the David Lam we are most familiar with, but a second David Lam who emigrated from Hong Kong in 1965, as featured in this September 2002 Art Preview issue.
![Vancouver from the waterfront, a painting by Franklin Arbuckle, from the Seagram Collection of art, reprinted in the publication: Cities of Canada. The show toured Internationally in 1953-1954, and then toured across Canada in 1954-55. The following description is from The Rooms in Newfoundland which revisited the show in 2006:
In 1951, Samuel Bronfman (1898-1971), head of the House of Seagram, commissioned 22 Canadian Artists, including A.Y. Jackson, Robert Pilot, Joseph Casson, Albert Cloutier and Jacques Tonnancour to paint a range of cities within Canada. A legendary “captain of industry”, Bronfman rejected the stereotypical view of Canada that dominates even today — that of a vast, idyllic and untamed wilderness. He also felt that private enterprise should do its share to sell its country as well as its products on the world market. For this reason, Bronfman commissioned 90 paintings of Canadian urban centres and displayed a selection of them throughout the Americas and Europe in 1953-54. The exhibition — and its four-ton, custom-built display unit — travelled almost 50,000 kilometres, beginning in San Juan and continuing to Havana, Mexico City, Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, London, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Stockholm, the Hague, Madrid, and ending with a visit to the Canadian Armed Forces in Loest, West Germany. This was followed by a cross-Canada tour in 1954-55.
An assortment of young artists and their established peers participated in the ambitious Seagram project. Expert guidance in the selection process came from Robert Pilot and A.Y. Jackson, both of whom played important roles in the formation of the modern, national school of painting in the first half of the 20th century. Other participants who are now recognizable names in the history of Canadian art include Goodridge Roberts, Frederick B. Taylor and Albert Cloutier.
A new Canadian identity was emerging in the 1950s, and the paintings in Cities of Canada reflect this shifting character as clearly as the 1951 census. The population tripled in the first half of the 20th century, and almost 57 percent of Canadians were now located in urban environments. By this time Canada truly was a nation of city-dwellers, regardless of the rugged wilderness stereotype, and Bronfman meant to get this message across to the world — in his words, “to establish abroad a familiarity with our urban life.”
[source]
Franklin Arbuckle also has the prestigious honour of having the most tumbled image to date at Illustrated Vancouver, thanks to this Maclean’s cover image of Stanley Park from August 1, 1953. Speaking of which, here’s photographic proof that they actually did play checkers in Stanley Park, from the book “Stanley Park: An island in the city” by Ralph Bower.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luldwepMB61qc7pjjo1_1280.jpg)
Vancouver from the waterfront, a painting by Franklin Arbuckle, from the Seagram Collection of art, reprinted in the publication: Cities of Canada. The show toured Internationally in 1953-1954, and then toured across Canada in 1954-55. The following description is from The Rooms in Newfoundland which revisited the show in 2006:
In 1951, Samuel Bronfman (1898-1971), head of the House of Seagram, commissioned 22 Canadian Artists, including A.Y. Jackson, Robert Pilot, Joseph Casson, Albert Cloutier and Jacques Tonnancour to paint a range of cities within Canada. A legendary “captain of industry”, Bronfman rejected the stereotypical view of Canada that dominates even today — that of a vast, idyllic and untamed wilderness. He also felt that private enterprise should do its share to sell its country as well as its products on the world market. For this reason, Bronfman commissioned 90 paintings of Canadian urban centres and displayed a selection of them throughout the Americas and Europe in 1953-54. The exhibition — and its four-ton, custom-built display unit — travelled almost 50,000 kilometres, beginning in San Juan and continuing to Havana, Mexico City, Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, London, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Stockholm, the Hague, Madrid, and ending with a visit to the Canadian Armed Forces in Loest, West Germany. This was followed by a cross-Canada tour in 1954-55.
An assortment of young artists and their established peers participated in the ambitious Seagram project. Expert guidance in the selection process came from Robert Pilot and A.Y. Jackson, both of whom played important roles in the formation of the modern, national school of painting in the first half of the 20th century. Other participants who are now recognizable names in the history of Canadian art include Goodridge Roberts, Frederick B. Taylor and Albert Cloutier.
A new Canadian identity was emerging in the 1950s, and the paintings in Cities of Canada reflect this shifting character as clearly as the 1951 census. The population tripled in the first half of the 20th century, and almost 57 percent of Canadians were now located in urban environments. By this time Canada truly was a nation of city-dwellers, regardless of the rugged wilderness stereotype, and Bronfman meant to get this message across to the world — in his words, “to establish abroad a familiarity with our urban life.”
[source]
Franklin Arbuckle also has the prestigious honour of having the most tumbled image to date at Illustrated Vancouver, thanks to this Maclean’s cover image of Stanley Park from August 1, 1953. Speaking of which, here’s photographic proof that they actually did play checkers in Stanley Park, from the book “Stanley Park: An island in the city” by Ralph Bower.
The Hotel Vancouver featured on the cover of Reid Fleming, the World’s Toughest Milkman, a comic book first published in 1986 by David Boswell. You can order reprints of his comic books from his website, and he also has digital downloads as well.
Fifty Years of Service (1891-1941), cover art by A. S. Barrett on a brochure from the B.C. District Telegraph & Delivery Co. Limited, seen at the VPL Special Collections Ref. NW Hist 338.74 B86f. I can find no other info on A. S. Barrett, though I came close with a mention of A. Oswald Barrett in Early Vancouver Volume 6. I suppose there’s a slim chance that A. S. Barrett is a descendent of A. O. Barrett. Here is the excerpt from conversations with Mr. Quintin James Trotter, 26 March 1941:
Kew Beach, (West Vancouver) 1919.
“It’s a long story as to how I acquired Kew Beach, but to cut it short, in 1913 it fell into my hands as debt; I loaned $12,600 on it as a mortgage to A. Oswald Barrett, and there was a second mortgage against it in favour of a Colonel Mainguy. The property comprised fifty acres, taking in the point. There was no legal difficulty; everything was very agreeable, and it was arranged that I should take over the property. Mr. Barrett is still in Vancouver, and we are good friends. And I paid $1,800 in back taxes on it.”
Industry, a two-part mural painted for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Painted by Paul Goranson, E.J. Hughes, and Orville Fisher, the three “were known as The Three Musketeers of Art’ in reference to the fact that they were artists who had enlisted.” (source) The trio also called themselves the West Coast Brotherhood, echoing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. (source)
A total of 15 make that 12 murals in this series were painted, part of a project called “Art in Action”, which featured the murals painted on the walls of the exhibition hall. WWII caused the Expo to close early, but smaller versions of the murals survive in the BC Archives in Victoria. (source) These two murals are also seen in the book Free Spirit: Stories of You, Me and BC by Gerald Truscott.
E.J. Hughes, described by Jack Shadbolt as “the most engaging intuitive painter of the BC landscape since Emily Carr”, he is truly an icon of modern day Canadian art. (source)
“Orville Fisher’s paintings of the Second World War constitute one of the most complete records of Canada’s day-to-day role in that conflict. Perhaps his chief claim to fame is that he was the only Allied war artist to land in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944. This achievement is all the more extraordinary given the fact that he almost never made it overseas in the first place.” More
Orville Fisher’s mural featuring the figure of Mercury, god of messages and glad tidings, appears inside the post office building at 349 West Georgia Street, by the Homer Street entrance. He also assisted with the 1951 mural “B.C. Pageant” with Charles Comfort and 2 students.
“After the war, Goranson remained for two years with the RCAF in Ottawa, working up his pencil, charcoal and watercolour sketches into canvases. Then, finding no work in Toronto, he went to New York” (source) where “he became a display designer and then a scenic artist, joining the Metropolitan Opera in 1965. Here he worked under artists and designers such as Franco Zefferelli, Sir Cecil Beaton, and Marc Chagall. But he remained a Canadian citizen and, upon retirement in 1986 at the age of 75, returned to Vancouver.” (source)
Goranson is, without a doubt, one of my all time favourites.
Low resolution images PDP02285 and PDP02286 shown here are courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives. Cross-posted to Vancouver Is Awesome.
A Preliminary Report upon the City’s Appearance : Vancouver, British Columbia, cover dated October, 1947. Part of the Harland Bartholomew reports for the Vancouver Town Planning Commission, digitized with assistance from Bing Thom Architects as a gift to the City of Vancouver for its 125th birthday.
Detail of a street mural by Kris Friesen, City of Vancouver street mural created July 2003, located a couple blocks from Commercial Drive at Woodland & Venables.
Untitled - downtown Vancouver (c1935, pen & ink, watercolour), by Maud Rees Sherman. From a small handmade calendar intended to be sold in a local jewellery store. “Maud Rees Sherman was born in Mission City, B.C. in 1900, at the start of the new century, and died in North Vancouver, B.C. in 1976. Her father R.S. Sherman was a prominent Vancouver educator, naturalist, author, and artist.” source
Old Hotel Vancouver, a sketch by Charles Hepburn Scott circa 1929, featuring the Art Gallery steps and the second Hotel Vancouver (now the site of the Sears building). From the VAG’s 1989 Charles Hepburn Scott publication.
![Not likely to inspire quite as many good memories as the previous post, this is the very first Hotel Vancouver (1887). From the holiday supplement to the “Vancouver Daily and Weekly World” [Vancouver Daily and Weekly World Publishing Company]; lithographed by Elliott, Pub. Co. 120 Sutter St., S.F. Special Coll. Ref. Map Cabinet 912.71133 V2232v 1890](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lesmgaFHOW1qc7pjjo1_1280.jpg)
Not likely to inspire quite as many good memories as the previous post, this is the very first Hotel Vancouver (1887). From the holiday supplement to the “Vancouver Daily and Weekly World” [Vancouver Daily and Weekly World Publishing Company]; lithographed by Elliott, Pub. Co. 120 Sutter St., S.F. Special Coll. Ref. Map Cabinet 912.71133 V2232v 1890
