Landscapes of Sport, Landscapes of Exclusion: The “Sportsman’s Paradise” in Late-Nineteenth-Century Canadian Painting

• Published in: Journal of Canadian Studies
• Main Author: Jessup, Lynda
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2006
• Subjects: History; Cultural Studies; Atlantic salmon
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jcs.40.1.71; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/jcs.40.1.71

This essay deals with a group of late-nineteenth-century landscape paintings that were painted for members of the sportsmen’s club movement, who leased salmon rivers in Atlantic Canada for sport fishing. In Canada, as elsewhere, the removal of Native rights to the animal world, through the introduction of policies and laws restricting hunting and fishing technologies and access, went hand in hand with the aesthetic appropriation of the environment as landscape. For this reason it can be argued that in picturing Atlantic Canada as the recreational landscape of these elite tourists—“a sportsman’s paradise”— paintings of the region are also products of the history of Native exclusion from the Atlantic salmon fishery. Thus they provide a point of access to the complex history of Native-settler interaction for public art galleries in Canada currently involved in the incorporation of Native North American material into the existing public narrative of Canadian art.