Landscapes of Sport, Landscapes of Exclusion: The "Sportsman's Paradise" in Late-Nineteenth-Century Canadian Painting

TLDR: Mitchell as mentioned in this paper examined a group of late-nineteenth-century landscape paintings that were painted for members of the sportsmen's club movement, who leased salmon rivers in Atlantic Canada for sport fishing.

Abstract: This essay deals with a group of late-nineteenth-century landscape paintings that were painted for members of the sportsmen's club movement, who leased salmon rivers in Atlantic Canada for sport fishing. In Canada, as elsewhere, the removal of Native rights to the animal world, through the introduction of policies and laws restricting hunting and fishing technologies and access, went hand in hand with the aesthetic appropriation of the environment as landscape. For this reason it can be argued that in picturing Atlantic Canada as the recreational landscape of these elite tourists-"a sportsman's paradise"-paintings of the region are also products of the history of Native exclusion from the Atlantic salmon fishery. Thus they provide a point of access to the complex history of Native-settler interaction for public art galleries in Canada currently involved in the incorporation of Native North American material into the existing public narrative of Canadian art. Le present article porte sur un groupe de peintures paysagistes du dernier quart du XIXe siecle qui ont ete realisees par des membres du mouvement des clubs de sportifs qui louaient des rivieres a saumon dans le Canada atlantique pour faire de la peche recreative. Au Canada, comme ailleurs, la suppression resultante des droits autochtones au monde animal-par l'introduction de politiques et lois restreignant les technologies et l'acces a la chasse et a la peche-est allee de pair avec l'affectation esthetique de l'environnement comme paysage. Pour cette raison, on peut avancer qu'en montrant le Canada atlantique comme le paysage recreatif de ces touristes d'elite (un paradis des sportifs), les peintures de cette region sont egalement un produit de l'histoire de l'exclusion autochtone des peches au saumon atlantique. Ces peintures fournissent donc un point d'acces a l'histoire complexe des interactions entre les Autochtones et les colons pour les galeries d'art publiques au Canada qui essaient presentement d'incorporer du materiel autochtone nord-americain dans le recit public actuel de l'art canadien. Landscape as a cultural medium ... has a double role with respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes a social and cultural construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site. Thus, landscape (whether urban or rural, artificial or natural) always greets us as a space, as environment, as that within which "we" (figured as "the figures" in the landscape) find-or lose-ourselves. An account of landscape understood in this way therefore ... has to trace the process by which landscape effaces its own readability and naturalizes itself and must understand that process in relation to what might be called "the natural histories" of its own beholders. [It is a question of] what we have done and are doing to our environment, what the environment in turn does to us, how we naturalize what we do to each other, and how these "doings" are enacted in the media of representation we call "landscape." W.J.T. Mitchell (1994, 2) This essay focusses on a significant body of landscape paintings from the last quarter of the nineteenth century that depict, or were painted for, recreational fishermen from central Canada and the northeastern United States who leased salmon rivers in Atlantic Canada for sport fishing. The pictures, which deal with common subject matter, were painted for art patrons and collectors who were active participants in the "sportsmen's club movement" that swept northeastern North America in the mid-1870s. Each reproduces the motivating ideas of the movement, giving visual expression to contemporary notions of wilderness as a therapeutic environment, an antidote to the debilitating effects of urban-industrial civilization. It was in pursuit of this wilderness experience that the movement organized elite tourists into private clubs for the pursuit of sport, which was conceptualized as a form of personal involvement in the rhythms of nature and for the preservation of game, which they saw as threatened by the same urban-industrial capitalism that compelled their periodic retreat to wilderness. …