A giant map of the Saint John River is laid out on a table in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton.
The map is close to six feet long, and is so big that the gallery had to build a new table to display it.
The map — which was drawn as part of an 1826 survey of the Saint John River — meticulously details the river from Fredericton to Grand Falls.
“It’s an incredibly detailed look at every bend in the river. It’s all hand drawn and hand-coloured with watercolour,” said Josh Green, manager of the Special Media Unit at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick.
Art of the archives: New exhibit reveals New Brunswick’s history
Fredericton’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery partners with the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick to showcase historical treasures from the past.
In addition to the natural topography the map marks all the churches and taverns dotted along the river.
When this map was created, it was never intended to be displayed in an art gallery.
However, the map — along with a collection of often quirky visual artifacts from the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick — is on display at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, as part of an exhibit that is, fittingly, called ARTchives.
Finding ‘documentary art’
Visitors will find artifacts dating back to the late 18th century: sketches, architectural drawings, political cartoons, labels, the original drawing for the New Brunswick flag, and even plans for the Bricklin, the famous sportscar with the gull-wing doors made in New Brunswick in the Seventies.
The items were pulled from boxes in the repository of the archives and are what Green and other archivists call “documentary art.”
That can mean hand-crafted or printed “documents which speak to the political or social atmosphere of a place and time,” said Green. “It’s very broad and vague, but for us it meant we could start considering almost everything.”
Visitors will find pieces, like these labels, never intended to be displayed in a gallery. (Jon Collicott/CBC)
Considering the possibilities — the items on display came from a collection of more than 90,000 boxes — was a daunting task. Green said the provincial archives has been working in the background on the exhibit since just before the pandemic.
“I think we have one map here and there are thousands — maybe tens of thousands of maps — that we had to consider whittling it down from,” said Green, who added that there were also thousands of architectural drawings and sketches to sift through.
John Leroux, manager of collections and exhibitions at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, said they were pruning the exhibit until just before it opened. Some artifacts made it to the gallery before he realized there wouldn’t be enough space to display them.
“We could have had a show that was 10 times this size but where would we have put it all? It was a matter of saying a lot with a little,” said Leroux, who worked with the archivists on the exhibit.
‘Everything is done by hand’
Leroux said a lot of pieces in the exhibit were chosen because they show just how many things used to be made by hand.
“Today we long for the hand-made, and things with integrity,” said Leroux. “Everything [here] is done by hand. There’s no machine in any of this.”
An architectural drawing from James Dumaresq, the architect who designed the New Brunswick Legislature building in Fredericton. (Jon Collicott/CBC)
He said the idea for this show came to him almost by accident. He was at the archives looking through government documents about the Centennial Building and found a rough sketch from artist Bruno Bobak that was a plan for one of the building’s murals.
He hopes people who have the chance to visit the exhibit, which runs until May, also realize that the archives are much more than a collection of census forms and government records.
Hidden in all those boxes are works of art, just waiting to be rediscovered.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
