Triangulating the ROM

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2006 by Duffy, Dennis

Though the story of the Royal Ontario Museum's founding usually deals with Charles Trick Currelly and Sir Edmund Walker as the diarchy, it is also possible to rethink this figuration and place George Crofts also at the centre of the ROM's history. His selfless collecting on behalf on the museum gave it a clear lead in establishing itself as a repository of East Asian objects. All these men exploited the arrangements made possible by a global empire, another factor in the ROM's rise to cultural prominence. The linkages between their various activities show us a work-in-progress, a case study of the ways in which institutions embody from their beginning the questions of ownership and provenance that continue to concern cultural collectors.

Bien que la fondation du Musée royal de l'Ontario soit généralement associée à la dyarchie de Charles Trick Currelly et Sir Edmund Walker, on pourrait réviser cette figuration pour inclure George Crofts au centre de l'histoire du MRO. Sa généreuse collecte d'artefacts pour le Musée permit à celui-ci de devenir un chef de file dans la collection d'objets de l'Asie de l'Est. Tous ces hommes profitèrent des circonstances créées par un empire global (un autre facteur qui a placé le MRO sur un piédestal culturel). Les liens entre leurs diverses activités nous montrent une oeuvre en cours d'élaboration-une étude de cas illustrant les façons dont les établissements incorporaient dès le début les questions de propriété et de provenance qui continuent d'intéresser les collecteurs culturels modernes.

Centrally located near the seat of Ontario's government, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) also stands at the centre of Toronto middleclass culture. Growing up in Toronto still means Saturday morning classes and/or school field trips to the ROM. Daily 2,500 people pour through its majestic entrance, with its art deco evocation of the arts of all mankind, and purchase their tickets in the rotunda aglow with allegorical mosaics (MacKay 2004; see also Merriman 1989). Eager docents beckon from the banks at the entry to the exhibition hall, and the impossibly tall totem poles jack a visitor's gaze upward at a neck-wrenching angle for four storeys. Student artists cruise with folding canvas stools in hand as they navigate their copyist assignments.

Summer and winter, the school buses and their screen of sidewalk vendors idle in the Avenue Road parking quay, the daycamp kids with their matching T-shirts chirp their way inside, and every corridor (even in the behind-thescenes chambers where the recreational workshops take place) throbs with excitement. The ROM has been building its future public almost from its startits founding director, Charles Trick Currelly (1876-1957), an early adherent of the concept of the child-centred museum, planned it that way (Mak 1996, 132-65). Especially in summer, a Dorothy just off the set of the Wizard of Oz would recognize that she was once again adrift in a crowd of people all under four feet high. Any lone adult found in that country is obviously a tourist; any Toronto middle-class parent can describe in detail every inch of the dinosaur exhibits. Parents and teachers took us there long ago, and now we are performing the heritage rite for our own children and grandchildren. Margaret Atwood sets her novel Life Before Man (1979) in the ROM, testimony to the institution's importance in Toronto, an imaginative massing matched only by the monumentalizing of the Bloor Street Viaduct in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion (1987).

Such an institution-still Canada's premier all-purpose museum-spun its own narratives long before Atwood created hers (Mak 1996, 19). The ROM is weighty enough to have produced its own Genesis narrative: Charles Trick Currelly's memoir, /Brought the Ages Home (1956). Reflecting the Emersonian apothegm that "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man" (35), Currelly measured his at sunset rather than at noon: "[Mjodesty," he once noted in a letter to Edmund Walker (c. 1907), "is not my chief characteristic" (Walker Papers).

Neither is modesty the chief characteristic of his memoir's title. Its first and final words alike demand scrutiny. The title's first version, /Brought the Ages Home to Toronto got lost somewhere during the publishing process (Hyman 1956). So might have some of the objects discussed there. Can any Egyptian mummy ever call the intersection of Bloor Street and Avenue Road "home"? And that lonesome "I": anyone curious about the Sir Edmund Walker (18481924) to whom the book is dedicated soon discovers that he was central to the ROM's foundation, as the pages of I Brought the Ages Home admit.

Although the ROM's official historian admits, however, that "Tact was not one of Currelly's finer points," Lovât Dickson's narrative still positions Currelly at the centre of the ROM's founding (1986, 36).' All versions of the master narrative follow the same pattern. Whether in an early letter of Currelly, or in the memoir itself, or finally as encapsulated a half century later in a 1978 luncheon speech by a successor to Currelly, the sequence remains intact: Currelly's was the dream, and Walker's the financial and social heft quickening the dream (Currelly files; Cruise 1978, 1-2). On 11 April 1957, Currelly's first successor issued a press release on the occasion of his death that left no doubt as to the curatorial version of the ROM's origins: "His was the imagination, the energy, the knowledge which brought the museum into existence" (Tushingham, Currelly Papers). Yet this chicken-and-egg sequence will not really hold; its simplistic account needs amplification. The neat narrative are of visionary yielding to enabler not only fails to hold up under examination, but it also excludes a third figure, a later player whose work reshaped that founding and gave the entire enterprise a different direction than that determined by the original diarchy: George Crofts (1872-1924). Considering his role decentres Currelly and Walker. It places them within a synergy that relocates the ROM's founding within a wider history than that of Toronto. A triumvirate offers a better model than a diarchy of the forces driving the growth and continuance of a major Canadian cultural institution.