Modernity and post-colonialism: the Heart of the Empire

Labour/Le Travail, Fall, 2003 by Ellen L. Ramsay

As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. In the counterpoint of Western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work. (1)

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A CONTRAPUNTAL READING of F.M. Bell-Smith's painting, The Heart of the Empire (Fig. 1), 1909, reveals the rhizomic nature of imperialism in the early 20th century. Not only was this an era of emergent nationhood, but it was also a period of capitalist development. The consolidation of various markets, media, demographic changes, motorized transport systems, gender relations, and social upheavals in both metropolitan centres and colonial hinterlands jostled with one another for recognition as significant markers of a new age. Most particularly was this happening in the country that could now envision independence of both its Anglo- and Franco-Canadian constituents. This painting of modernity by F.M. Bell-Smith, an Englishman transposed to a new nation, thus becomes a kind of parchment or palimpsest on which various ideas of empire are inscribed. A cursory glance at the painting will inform the viewer that the urban scene depicts busy Threadneedle Street in London, England with the Royal Exchange (centre) and the Bank of England (left) prominently displayed in the background, lending the area its name of Bank Junction. The middle and foreground of the painting show a busy throng of people from various occupational and class backgrounds (of both sexes) travelling by foot, horse-drawn carriage, motor-driven cars, and omnibuses around a statue of the Duke of Wellington.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

F.M. Bell-Smith's painting had a very famous precursor in the 1904 painting of the same title, The Heart of the Empire, by Neils M. Lund (Fig. 2). Originally purchased for the Lord Mayor of London, Sir William Treloar, the Lund painting now hangs in the Guildhall Art Gallery. An aerial view from the roof of the Mansion House, it depicts the same busy junction from a different perspective. In an article on Lund's streetscape, Iain S. Black has used the painting as an illustration of the 19th-century Victorian city, contrasting this depiction to the subsequent rebuilding of the Bank of England between 1919 and 1939. As Black argues, the painting has been seen by scholars as the "paradigmatic representation of the City of Empire," but goes on to suggest that the political and economic context for the city's landscape was actually unstable at the time. He asserts that while the "empire clearly provided an important context for the [painting], it was only one such context and not necessarily always the most important." Warning "against reducing explanations ... to a purely imperial discourse," Black points out the temporal nature of the interpretation of the city in the recent use of Lund's painting by conservationists in the 1980s. (2) This revisionist reading of Black can be supplemented, however, with a post-colonial assessment of Bell-Smith's painting of the same title.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith (1846-1923) emigrated to Canada from England in the year of Canada's Confederation, 1867. He came from a family of respected artists and settled into a livelihood of photography, graphics, and teaching. In 1886 he was one of a handful of Canadian artists who was granted a free rail-pass for the newly completed Canadian Pacific trans-national railway route, and firmly established his reputation at landscape painting in this era of "nation-building." Ata time when Canadian writers were filling novels with tales of exploration, Canadian art academicians were trying to build a "national school" of painters through landscape. Bell-Smith, a founder member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA), was an example of this tradition.

Bell-Smith not only established himself as a premier landscape painter, but also became known for urban genre scenes. From youth, Bell-Smith sketched street scenes in London, England where he himself found work in a Cheapside shirt and collar factory (1861). In Montreal (1867) the artist continued his sketches, now depicting local French Canadian scenes. Both Frederic and his father John Bell-Smith were founding members of the Society of Canadian Artists (1867) and immersed themselves in the artistic life of the nation. In Montreal it is believed that the son found work at the photography works of James Inglis, colouring photographs, and began exhibiting sporting scenes at the Fifth Exhibition (1868) of the Art Association of Montreal and the Society of Canadian Artists. In 1874 Frederic Bell-Smith moved to Toronto and exhibited in the second exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists. By 1877-1878 he began his teaching career at the Ontario School of Art. In 1881-82 he went to London and Paris with his wife, Arme Myra Dyde, and in Paris joined Colarossi's studio under Celestin-Joseph Blanc (1818-1888), Joseph-Paul Blanc (1846-1904), Gustave Courtois (1853-1923), and Edmond-Louis Dupain (1847-nd). He then returned to Canada to become the Director of Fine Arts at Alma College until 1890. He moved to London, Ontario and founded the Western Art League and was appointed drawing master to the Central Public School until 1888. In 1887 Bell-Smith was made full academician of the RCA. In 1888 he moved back to Toronto and embarked on other trips to the Rockies aboard the Canadian Pacific Railway, and to England, France, and Holland. He studied under the popular American painter Thomas Alexander Harrison and became aware of Impressionism through the works of James McNeill Whistler and others. From 1891 (age 45) he settled into a life of teaching and painting. (3)