Becoming Montreal: The 1800s Painted by Duncan

From town to metropolis: Montreal revealed though five decades of watercolours at the McCord Stewart Museum

Montreal, May 31, 2023. – From June 2, 2023, to April 21, 2024, the McCord Stewart Museum presents Becoming Montreal: The 1800s Painted by Duncan. With this first retrospective devoted to the painter and watercolourist James Duncan, the Museum continues its cycle of exhibitions dedicated to the transformation of Montreal’s urban landscape, this time focusing on a pivotal period in the growth of Montreal into the metropolis it is today. Curated by Christian Vachon, Curator of Documentary Art and Head of Collections Management at the McCord Stewart Museum, and Laurier Lacroix, C.M., Professor Emeritus, Université du Québec à Montréal, the exhibition presents the artist’s many views, which, when combined, provide a vivid and detailed portrait of the city from the 1830s to the late 1870s. Visitors will discover the island’s topography, Montreal’s cityscape, and scenes from the life of its inhabitants. As a sort of epilogue, the digital artwork studio Iregular reinterprets Duncan’s work in the form of computer-generated images depicting a composite world of dreamscapes of a Montreal that no longer exists. The exhibition is presented by La Presse.

Precursor of photojournalism

A true chronicler of his time, James Duncan documented the city’s evolution over the five decades he was active there. The scenes he painted, some of which were published in the British press, provide an invaluable visual record before photography could capture current events. Duncan had a front-row seat to chronicle the happy and tragic events that make up everyday life in Montreal. During this period, the agglomeration grew from a medium-sized town of a few 27,000 souls to a metropolis with a population of more than 140,000. In the exhibition, visitors can see this rapid transformation from the artist’s favourite viewpoints: Mount Royal and St. Helen’s Island.

“This collection of more than one hundred of Duncan’s works allows us to follow the evolution of his career and also of Montreal. Through his panoramas, Duncan kept track of the changes that were reshaping the city. The suite of building views in Hochelaga Depicta (1839), for example, shows in detail the British colonial town at one stage of its development,” says Laurier Lacroix.
Duncan also witnessed the construction of Montreal’s Canadian identity within the British Empire. This identity, which was constructed with a clear desire to distinguish itself from the United States and Great Britain, involved appropriating Indigenous practices as popular recreational activities. Works illustrate lacrosse games, snowshoe races and tobogganing.

Love for Montreal

Particularly interested in local customs, the artist paints the hustle and bustle of the street as city dwellers go about their daily activities. Sensitive to the movement of the seasons, he celebrates the colours of fall and is remarkably inspired by winter. Since he mainly earned a living from commissions and sales to tourists, James Duncan’s work focuses on aspects of Montreal that are perceived as exotic by foreign audiences: winter, clothing, market scenes, transportation, recreation, and features of the urban physical environment.

“Duncan was one of the first British artists to settle permanently in Montreal. Looking at his work, you can see that he loved his adopted city. I hope that people will discover a side of the city’s history that they didn’t know, and will remember that Montreal is a splendid and unique city, and always has been,” says Christian Vachon.

Object photographs

Duncan rediscovered

This first retrospective will introduce the public to the artistic merits of a painter who was quickly forgotten after his death:

“Even at the end of his life, critics in the newspapers called him old, because the attention was now on younger painters with a more modern style. Museums and collectors rediscovered him much later, taking an interest in the documentary quality of his work, rather than its aesthetic qualities. He became known for his views of Montreal, which closely tracked the developments shaping the city. Yet his talent as a landscape painter is undeniable. The exhibition celebrates both the documentary value of Duncan’s work and his talent as a landscape artist,” says Christian Vachon.

“I had a superficial understanding of Duncan from the few images most often reproduced. I discovered a painter who’s attentive to the city’s evolution, a unique witness to the habits and customs of urban life, a talented artist involved in Montreal’s community and educational life. Through Duncan, we get a glimpse at a little-known chapter of Montreal’s history,” says Laurier Lacroix.

“Drawing on the formidable collection of the McCord Stewart Museum, the generosity of many national museums and private collections, and the extensive research of the curators, Becoming Montreal: The 1800s Painted by Duncan provides a rare opportunity for the public to discover Montreal pre–industrial revolution. This project is in line with the Museum’s mission to showcase and document the city’s history, the diversity of its neighbourhoods, and the energy of its urban life, all of which make it a top destination today,” says Anne Eschapasse, President and CEO of the McCord Stewart Museum.

MENTAL MAPS – Digital artwork by Iregular

To complement this exhibition, the Museum commissioned a piece from the digital art studio Iregular, who fed James Duncan’s images of yesteryear Montreal to artificial intelligence. The studio then designed a three-dimensional virtual world of computer-generated images made of layers of superimposed topographies.

“When we started to work on MENTAL MAPS a year ago, the intention was simply to visualize how the artistic decisions of James Duncan and his resulting body of work deeply influenced the depiction of Montreal in people’s imagination. Fast forward to the present, with the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems becoming commonplace, the value of MENTAL MAPS now resides in how it’s helping us better understand the power of AI, and the role we humans carry in a world where such systems possess the capability to generate intricate images from simple prompts on a computer,” says Daniel Iregui, artist and founder of Iregular.

The experiential work offers a vision of what the world could look like through the eyes of someone whose entire reality is modelled after an artist’s illustrations. Visitors are invited to wander through this virtual space, as their moving shadows hide or reveal unexpected layers. The result is a unique, constantly changing experience that creates shifting dreamscapes derived from Duncan’s work.

The McCord Stewart Museum gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts in the production of the digital work presented in this exhibition.

Exhibition views

Credits and curatorial team

An exhibition conceived and organized by the McCord Stewart Museum.

Project Manager: Catherine K. Laflamme, McCord Stewart Museum
Curators: Laurier Lacroix, C.M., Professor Emeritus, Université du Québec à Montréal, and Christian Vachon, Curator, Documentary Art and Head, Collections Management, McCord Stewart Museum
Exhibition designers: Anick La Bissonnière and Eric-Olivier Lacroix
Graphic design: David Martin
Digital work: Iregular

Book: James Duncan (1806-1881) – Painter of Montreal

James Duncan (1806–1881) – Painter of Montreal is the first monograph dedicated to James Duncan. More than 160 works by the artist reveal different facets of his career and immerse the reader in 19th century Montreal. The book includes three essays that enrich our understanding of Duncan’s work: a comprehensive biography by Laurier Lacroix, C.M., Professor Emeritus at the Université du Québec à Montréal; a review of three albums containing Duncan’s work by Arlene Gehmacher, L.R. Wilson curator of Canadian Art and Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum; and a study of Duncan’s depictions of Montreal published in The Illustrated London News by Christian Vachon, Head of Collections Management and Curator of Documentary Art, at the McCord Stewart Museum. A new chronology completes the book.

James Duncan (1806-1881) – Painter of Montreal

210 pages
Publisher: McCord Stewart Museum
Distributor: Publications du Québec and McCord Stewart Museum Boutique
On sale at the Museum Boutique for $55
ISBN: 978-1-7-7389247-1-4 (EN: 978-1-7-7389247-0-7)

Download the documents

Press release (PDF)
Press release (WORD)

Press images

Object photographs
Exhibition views