Finding the Box of Anne Langton History

[Image of 19^th century Anne Langton]

About 1974 or 75, my mom was the Secretary/Treasurer of the Fenelon Falls Library Board.  It had decided that the library which was on the main street of Fenelon Falls needed to be relocated because, well they needed more space.  So a huge clean-out happened and my mom with Mrs. Sneddon who was the librarian started clearing up a lot of books that were no longer being circulated too often.

While that was happening they came upon a very large cardboard box, which had been pushed at the back of the library in some sort of nook or cranny.  When my mom opened it she realized that it contained over a hundred watercolours and sketches by the pioneer artist and writer Anne Langton.

Needless to say, she thought this was quite exciting and immediately thought “Well wait a minute, what should we be doing about this, because these are very fragile sketches and they need to be preserved.”

So the library board had a meeting and Dr. George Johnson, who was the President of the Board at the time, agreed with my mom that something needed to be done.  So my mother writes to the Conservation Institute in Ottawa asking if they could bring the sketches to them to have them appraised and to get some advice as to what should happen to them.

So, I was privileged to go on that little expedition because I as at university at the time.  I went with my mom to the Conservation Institute in Ottawa and we met with the curator there and he took the sketches and had them look carefully examined and said “These are very, very valuable in fact they’re in the quality of work is equal to anything the Group of Seven ever produced. “

So, again we were thrilled and said, “Well what happens next?”  And he said “Well they need to be preserved and catalogued and made sure that they don’t get exposed to light and heat changes and so on.”

So we left them at the Conservation Institute, I don’t know how long, several months and then when we picked them up we had made a connection with a small art gallery in Kingston who were interested in exhibiting them.  So that was their first exhibit after they had been treated.

And from there, that connection led us to the ROM, Royal Ontario Museum.  They have a Canadian collection and they were exhibited there.  That would have been 1976 possibly; and then they were brought back, and with the full intention, that they continue to be the property of the Fenelon Falls library.  But of course the library is the property of the village; and the library did not have a new location at that time – they were still trying to figure out where to put it.  So the sketches went into the vault in the municipal office and they stayed there for a very long time.

[Watercolour of a yellow canoe on edge of lake]