Mccord photography show features rare images of 19th century Canada

Those with just a passing familiarity with Quebec historical photography will know the names Notman, Livernois and Edwards.

Lesser known, nearly anonymous, is Alexander Henderson. The Mccordstewart Museum in Montreal is rectifying that curious lack of recognition with an exhibition of some 250 photographs from the Scottish immigrant’s body of work, spanning from 1857 to 1897.

When Henderson died in 1913, the exhibit’s notes say, his obituaries made no mention of his remarkable career as a photographer, “an omission that continues to mystify Henderson experts today.”

That omission might have been even more mysterious, were it not for the foresight of a former head curator at the Mccord, Stanley Triggs, who acted to secure Henderson’s archives from his last direct descendant.

That was after the grandson, who in 1965 inherited the family’s home in Westmount, removed boxes of precious glass negatives from the basement and “disposed of his grandfather’s life’s work by way of the municipal garbage service.”

Only 15 of Henderson’s glass negatives survive: eight in the Mccord collection and seven at the Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec in Quebec City. The MNBAQ also has a collection of some 80 prints, one of which, a scene of snowfall in Lacbeauport, is on exhibit.

The absence of negatives meant Mccord curators, to mount the exhibit, had to use the original prints, selected from nearly 2,000 photographs. This is considered to be “but a fraction of [Henderson’s] total output.” The photos mounted in the multi-room exhibit are a sampling of a varied career that took Henderson across Canada and to many regions of Quebec.

Henderson and his wife Agnes Robertson, both from well-to-do families, arrived in Montreal two weeks after their marriage in 1855. He had opted to forego the dull life of an accountant for which he had studied and practiced briefly in Edinburgh.

The newlyweds quickly integrated into their Montreal milieu, which had a large population of immigrants from the British Isles. Henderson, who was already familiar with the emerging art and science of photography, took his inspiration from William Notman, with whom he would travel on photo missions, notably to Niagara Falls.

He started with a portrait studio – one of his subjects was prominent politician Thomas D’arcy Mcgee – but eventually followed his interest in nature and his new colonial environment, and embarked on landscape photography.

Railway construction was booming at the time, and Henderson was hired to take pictures of the structures being built. One such assignment, shared with Quebec City photographer Julesernest Livernois, was to photograph all the railway bridges on one line between Quebec City and Ottawa.

Henderson, besides being a highly artistic photographer, was also somewhat of an innovator in the craft. One of his techniques involved superimposing images of clouds on a landscape scene. At that time, because of the constraints of exposure time, it was difficult to capture sharp images of the foreground as well as the sky. Henderson used his stock of cloud shots to fill in the blank sky.

As Mccord photography curator Zoë Tousignant said in an interview, the Henderson exhibit is an exceptional opportunity to see Canada as it was during its formative years.

“It’s extremely rare in Canadian 19th-century photography to see the original prints that the photographer made at the time, because these are rare and precious objects and very fragile,” Tousignant said. “It’s so rare to see 19th-century Canadian photography anyway, but to have a show that is almost exclusively period prints is just amazing.”

Images of note for readers of The Record would include a view of Georgeville from 1863 and scenes of eating “wax” at a sugaring off party near Bromptonville. The Mccord’s collection, which can be viewed on its website, has several Townships photographs that did not make it into the exhibition, including an image of Sherbrooke taken from the east, in 1853, and a winter view of a mill dam on the Magog River, from 1865.

Henderson and his family spent considerable time in the Townships, one stretch under tragic circumstances. As former curator Stanley Triggs notes in his biography of Henderson, daughter Helen died of unknown causes at age eight in Knowlton in October 1864. Only five of the couple’s nine children survived to adulthood.

“(S)ince there are many photographs of that area in the amateur albums her father published the following year, it may be assumed that the family spent much of the summer and fall of 1864 there,” Triggs writes.

The exhibit curator, the recently retired Hélène Samson, said in a news release: “Henderson is a profoundly Romantic artist. His work conveys the emotions he felt faced with the beauty of nature – the metaphysical awe it inspired. His attention to detail and the sensuality of the environment, whether rural or urban, distinguished him from other photographers of the era, such as Notman.”

Besides documenting structures and scenes from late 19th-century Canada, Henderson captured images

from the lives of Indigenous people he encountered on his photographic travels. According to exhibit notes, Henderson represented “their realities without artifice, unlike his contemporaries who would romanticize them to satisfy the interests of their bourgeois clientele.”

The Henderson exhibit is part of the

museum’s centennial celebrations. It opened in June and continues until April 2023.

The museum has published a coffeetable book, Alexander Henderson: Art and Nature, containing most of the photos and documentation from the exhibit.