"Fathers of Confederation" was a famous large-scale oil painting of size eight by thirteen feet, commissioned by the Canadian federal government in 1883 and painted by artist Robert Harris to commemorate the conferences that had been instrumental to the process of Confederation.
Born in Wales, Harris emigrated with his family to Prince Edward Island in 1856. After studying art abroad he returned to Canada not long after a confederation agreement had been struck, where he worked as a freelance illustrator until he was approached by the Department of Public Works in Ottawa about the possibility of a painting of Canada's founding fathers, to hang in the Railway Committee Room of the House of Commons.
Harris was initially offered four thousand dollars to paint the Charlottetown Conference of 1864. Glad to have been offered anything at all and flattered to have been asked, he accepted; shortly afterward the government changed its request to a painting of the Quebec Conference, which had a considerably greater number of delegates in attendance and therefore would require more work to immortalise in art. Naturally, they failed to offer Harris any more money.
Harris decided on a compromise, sacrificing factuality for incorporating as many fathers of Confederation as he could, specifically those which had attended either conference. The resulting painting, he felt, would not be so much a work of art as it would be a treasured piece of Canadiana.
I hoped it might have been preserved many hundreds of years as barring an accident it was good for any time and would in future have come to be looked on as a valuable historical document.
And so it was, though not in the way that Harris had intended. The painting was destroyed entirely, along with much of Parliament, in a fire in 1916. However, due to inattention to details pertaining to copyright laws on the part of the Canadian government, it had been reproduced a number of times indiscriminately, inaccurately, and without Harris' permission.
Printed in schoolbooks, newspapers, periodicals, and in poster form to be hung in classrooms, "Fathers of Confederation" became well-known and well-loved. All very good things -- but Harris was never given financial compensation for any of the reproductions, though not for lack of trying. The correspondence he kept with the Department of Public Works relating to the copyright was destroyed by fire in 1897, as was the entire building in which the department was housed. He never saw more than the four thousand dollars he had been paid for the original commission.
Four months after the Parliament fire, the Canadian government had the temerity to ask Harris to paint a copy. He agreed, and using his charcoal sketches and rough versions of the original painting managed to reproduce it. This copy still exists; it now hangs in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
Contributing to its ubiquity, "Fathers of Confederation" was reproduced on postage stamps on two occasions: 1916, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Confederation, and 1927, to mark the sixtieth. This second run of stamps was also the first in Canadian history to be entirely bilingual.
The painting itself depicts thirty-four of Canada's most prominent politicians at the time, posed around a large table in a magnificent meeting hall as if assembled for a photograph. John A. Macdonald appears at the centre of the painting, directly in front of a set of picture windows through which can be seen the Quebec harbour. In one hand he holds a piece of paper; this is quite possibly the draft of the Quebec Resolutions that outlined the constitution.
George- Étienne Cartier sits to Macdonald's right, and Hector Langevin to his left. Charles Tupper, who also holds a document, is shown standing in the front row. George Brown is seated in the front row, further to Macdonald's right. The rest of the delegates are arranged around these central figures, very roughly in order of importance.
They appear as follows:
First row (from the front, listed left to right): Edward Whalen, Samuel Tilley, George Brown, Charles Tupper
Second row: W.H. Steeves, John Hamilton Gray, Alexander Campbell, Hector Langevin, Oliver Mowat, Thomas D'Arcy McGee
Third row: Charles Fisher, George Coles, J.C. Chapais, Étienne-Paschal Taché, Alexander Galt, J. Cockburn, William McDougall, J. McCully
Fourth row: W.A. Henry, E.B. Chandler, Adams G. Archibald, Georges-Étienne Cartier, Thomas H. Haviland, J.H. Gray, A. Macdonald
Fifth row: Hewitt Bernard, Ambrose Shea, John A. Macdonald, Peter Mitchell, W.H. Pope, J.M. Johnson
Sixth row (back): E. Palmer, F.B.T. Carter, R.B. Dickey
Sources:
Belanger, Claude. Fathers of Confederation: The Harris Painting. http://www2.marianopolis.edu/quebechistory/federal/fathers.htm. Marianopolis College. 13 June 2004.
Williamson, Moncrieff. Bulletin 12, Robert Harris and the Fathers of Confederation. http://collections.ic.gc.ca/bulletin/num12/williamson1.html. National Gallery of Canada. 13 June 2004.
Oil Study for Repainting the Fathers of Confederation, 1916. http://www.nationhood.ca/html_en/collectionImage_viewer.cfm?collectionID=6799. Confederation Centre Art Gallery. 13 June 2004.
Fathers of Confederation, 50th Anniversary Stamp of Confederation 1917. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/05/0518/05180202/051802020104_e.html. National Archives of Canada. 13 June 2004.
The Path to Confederation. http://collection.nlc-bnc.ca/100/200/301/nlc-bnc/cdn_confederation-ef/1997/path.htm. National Library of Canada. 13 June 2004.
A reproduction of the painting can be viewed at http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/library/idb/forsey/images/fathers_of_confed.jpg.