Hanging Fred and a Few Others: Painters of the Eastern Townships

By Nick Fonda

Quebec's Eastern Townships are home to a higher concentration of artists than anywhere else in Canada. With his starting and finishing point being Frederick Coburn (1871–1960), arguably Canada's best-known painter at the peak of his career, author Nick Fonda sets out to revisit his work and provide new insights and facts into Coburn's life and surroundings. To better understand the man, he also introduces other accomplished artists living and working in the same area—not all landscape painters—who have followed quite unusual paths as they responded to the same muse that moved Coburn a century ago. Based on interviews with neighbors and Coburn aficionados and Nick Fonda's own thorough understanding of the milieu in which Coburn grew up, lived, and worked, Hanging Fred and a Few Others is a lively and fascinating story of an important artist but also a reflection on the role of place—the Eastern Townships—in an artist's life. In addition to being a biography of Coburn, Nick Fonda's book provides brief biographical sketches of other artists including Minnie Gill, Denis Palmer, Mary Martin, Stuart Main, France Jodoin, and Kevin Sonmor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Aug 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781771860215

Nick Fonda

Nick Fonda is an award-winning reporter who has also wielded chalk in classrooms in Canada and the UK for more than 25 years. He has kept in touch with reality—other than the overwhelming reality of schools—by plying such trades as lumberjack, carpenter, restaurateur and raconteur. Nick Fonda’s non Roads to Richmond: Portraits of Quebec’s Eastern Townships (Baraka Books 2010) was remarkably successful.

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Solitudes

Preface

To some extent, this book is an outgrowth of two previous projects: it’s an atonement of sorts for an omission in Roads to Richmond, and something of a companion piece to Café & Coburn, not that the reader need be in any way familiar with either of the earlier works to start reading this book.

At some point after Roads to Richmond was published, someone asked why, given the broad cross-section of professions and vocations that were profiled in the book, there were none of artists.

As oversights go, this one is not easy to explain and impossible to justify. The Eastern Townships, demographers tell us, are home to a higher concentration of artists than anywhere else in Canada, so there are a lot of them around: musicians, sculptors, dancers, film makers, potters, poets, writers. Even without input from statisticians, I know because I’ve met many of them, am friends with many of them.

By way of partially making up for that oversight, this book is exclusively about painters who live, or have lived, in the Eastern Townships. The emphasis on Frederick Simpson Coburn is an outgrowth of Café & Coburn, an hour-long, multi-media show designed to give the audience both an overview of Frederick Simpson Coburn’s oeuvre and a sense of the trajectory of his life.

The music and the acting that made Café & Coburn what it was can’t be captured on paper; however, Café & Coburn was also very much a voyage of discovery, an unearthing of a previously undocumented narrative thread in the life of Frederick Simpson Coburn that lends itself well to the written word.

When I began researching Café & Coburn, what I knew of the artist came largely from what I had learned from Teri Coburn, his great-niece, and from a book that her mother, Evelyn Lloyd Coburn, had published in 1996 (with Teri’s acknowledged help). F.S. Coburn, Beyond the Landscape is a beautiful and beautifully illustrated book that has the added merit of having been written by family. (Evelyn was married to Newlands Coburn, the only child of David Coburn, a Presbyterian minister and brother to Fred. When the artist passed away on May 26, 1960, Newlands Coburn was his closest relative and the principal beneficiary of his will.) Beyond the Landscape is the most comprehensive of the few books written about Coburn and tells his story more fully than this present book.

Curiously, the archives of the Richmond County Historical Society have hardly any material pertaining to the area’s most famous native son. (The irony is even greater: the archives are located almost exactly at the mid-point of the hundred yards that separate the place where Coburn was born from the place where he died.)

Beyond Evelyn Lloyd Coburn’s book, Café & Coburn owed much of its narrative inspiration to two people: Monique Nadeau-Saumier who provided a context in which to look at Coburn’s art, and Bob Laberge who, had a young woman said yes instead of no, would have been Coburn’s brother-in-law. While Bob only knew the artist for the last several years of the latter’s life, Bob’s deceased wife, Lois Lovett, was a next-door neighbour to the famous painter, and her family was as close emotionally to Fred Coburn as they were geographically. The trove of photographs collected and preserved over the years by Lois Lovett contributed greatly to the visual richness of Café & Coburn, and it was her stories, recounted by Bob, that revealed a previously undisclosed and undocumented chapter of Coburn’s life.

This admittedly eclectic book is both an account of the last decades of Coburn’s life, after the death of his wife, Malvina Scheepers, and a short introduction to a number of other artists, past and present, who, like Coburn, are, or were, deeply attached to the Eastern Townships. Why I chose these particular artists rather than any of the many others whose work and life stories are also noteworthy is, like the omission of artists altogether in Roads to Richmond, hard to explain or justify.

I’m not a painter although twice in those distant days before we had children, my wife and I signed up for painting classes, which permitted us, for a couple of hours a week, to dabble creatively—or otherwise—at our white canvas-boards. We never made it to the step during which, on a regular if not daily basis, we would set out our easels and our tubes of pigment and spend a few hours painting. Yet, when we enlarged the house by converting an attic into living space, we did it with the idea in mind that, once our children were grown and no longer needed a playroom, we would have a bright luminous space where we could paint. The kids have long gone, however we have yet to create our studio in that light-filled space.

We do occasionally go to galleries and more frequently to a vernissage (a word that sounds more elegant and simple than ‘exhibition opening’ or ‘private viewing’). We enjoy the annual tour des arts during which time local artists invite guests to improvised showrooms or sometimes their studios to view their work. Every now and again, we buy a painting.

A few times a year, I get a chance to interview an artiste peintre. Their stories inevitably intrigue me, and rarely do I leave the studio or the living room or the converted shed beside the house (wherever we may have sat to talk) without wishing I could take three or four paintings with me.

Sometimes we do re-visit an artist I’ve interviewed and we buy a painting. We have paintings by more than half of the artists whose stories are told in this book. We do not own a Coburn, but on my way to, or back from an interview, I’ll often take a little detour and drive on one of the old, back roads and take solace in knowing that I’m on the same roads that Coburn was on and looking at the same countryside that he so vividly portrayed in his work.

To that extent, this book is also something of a personal reflection on the role of place in an artist’s life. I occasionally drive along gravel roads that I know Coburn once rolled along in his dark green Graham-Paige; I daily look out at the same river that he used to gaze at (albeit from the opposite shore and half a mile downstream). I can go to one or two spots and look over vistas that are still much the same as those that Coburn transposed to canvas. Coburn passed away long before I went out with pen and paper to conduct an interview, but it goes without saying that I would have jumped at the chance to interview him. Still, I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to interview the artists that I have. There are a great many of them who live in what used to be Coburn’s corner of the world and who, in their own diverse ways, are moved by the same muse that permitted Coburn to become a notable painter.

Introduction

Quebec’s Eastern Townships lie south of the St. Lawrence River Valley, and begin where the flat, fertile lowlands give way to foothills that soon turn into the Appalachians. These are the oldest mountains in North America and they continue on down the Eastern Seaboard as far as Georgia. The Townships—defined by political boundaries and not geological formations—end abruptly at the Vermont border. Catherine Day, in 1869 (just two years after Confederation), wrote, The Eastern Townships are considered as including the belt of hilly country south of the St. Lawrence, extending from the southern and western frontiers of the Province, to the Bay of Chaleurs. (History of the Eastern Townships). The most recent realignment of the Townships places the northern boundary at the base of the foothills; the eastern boundary an imaginary line separating them from the Beauce; the western boundary, like the northern, at the base of the foothills; and of course, the southern boundary has remained unchanged.

(The question is sometimes asked why the Eastern Townships sit at the western end of southern Quebec. The answer is that, after the English Conquest, when surveyors started laying out large, roughly square townships with their lots and ranges, those in Lower Canada—what is now Quebec—were called the Eastern Townships, while those in what was Upper Canada, now southern Ontario, were named the Western Townships. While the name stuck in Quebec, it faded into history west of the Ottawa River.)

While the Eastern Townships still very much exist, as witnessed by the brochures and web-sites promoting the area as a holiday destination, and by the way the people who live in the Townships use the name, their official designation as an identifiable entity has changed a few times over the last two centuries, first to Les Cantons de l’est and then to L’Estrie, which is the formal name by which the Quebec government now refers to the area.

Still today, after about four centuries of European presence and two centuries of settlement, the Eastern Townships are largely wooded with cedar and pine and spruce and tamarack and balsam fir, with beech and birch and maple and oak and ash. Increasingly though, one sees plantations: monocultures of Scotch pine, of spruce, of hybrid aspen; fast-growing trees destined for the pulp mills which will transform them into cardboard and paper. Other stands are cut, as they have been for two hundred years, to be shipped to sawmills for lumber, or to be cut into cordwood to heat old farmhouses.

The first clearings in the Townships began in the last years of the eighteenth century with the arrival of settlers from the newly-formed United States who laboured to transform forests into fields, their first harvest being the forest itself as they cut and burned ancient hardwoods to make potash, the only cash crop produced by the first, small, subsistence farms. The St. Francis River was the first roadway for some of those early settlers, as it had been for the Abenaki people and the Iroquois before them. The first homesteads were established and followed by others. Hamlets formed, at first on the St. Francis River and then further inland where tributaries lent themselves to the construction of mills that ground grain, or cut lumber, or carded wool. In the two centuries since, many of these first settlements have disappeared leaving little more than overgrown, crumbling foundations in the middle of scrub-brush or second growth forest. Others grew prosperous for a while before subsiding into sleepy villages; and others yet, grew into small cities, and one of them, Hyatt’s Mills, has grown into Sherbrooke, Quebec’s sixth-largest city.

As for the people who live in the Townships, they too form a demographic that has changed as much as it has grown. By the middle of the nineteenth century the increasingly outnumbered, nomadic Abenaki had been either absorbed into the European population, or crowded onto a small reserve near the mouth of the St. Francis where it flows into the St. Lawrence. Now, in the twenty-first century, it’s only very rarely that you’ll meet an occasional Townshipper who can claim, quite proudly, to have Abenaki blood. The earliest settlers were Americans, and all but a very few were what have come to be known as Late Loyalists. These were young men and young families, who, more than a decade after the end of the War of Independence quit the fledgling United States for free, or almost free, land in what was left of British North America. They were soon inundated by successive waves of homesteaders from Scotland and Ireland (most of whom came before the famines) and England and Wales. There were German settlers as well—disbanded mercenaries recruited by the British army from places like Bavaria and Westphalia. Later there would be Swedes and Swiss and Dutch; Vietnamese and Central Americans. But most of all, starting in the years following the Rebellion of 1837, it was des Canadiens who came to settle here. And they did so despite initiatives on the part of the British government to populate the Townships with English-speaking Protestants, and some municipal by-laws forbidding sale of land to French Canadians, and despite the village priests who, from the pulpit, warned les fils d’habitants to ignore the fertile lands near villages with names like New London or Inverness inhabited by those who practiced protestant faiths, to remain in the St. Lawrence River valley where, within view of the spire of a Catholic church, their souls would be safe. By Confederation in 1867, Townshippers were an almost equal mix of English-speaking and French-speaking settlers. Since then, as in all of Quebec, French is the official language in the Townships though English is still heard, and there has been enough intermarriage that family names are not always an accurate indicator of a person’s mother tongue. Language is not normally an irritant in the Townships, nor has religion been an issue for more than half a century.

Through the 1600s and until the very late 1700s the Townships were left all but untouched by European colonists. First the French and later the English felt it best to leave the hilly and wooded Townships as a natural barrier against enemy attack, even if it was a permeable barrier. Before and during the Seven Years’ War, Abenaki warriors paddled south to raid English settlements. (The Abenaki were originally from what is now the United States; they came to the St. Lawrence Valley and settled as refugees from the English and as a protection against incursions by the English settlers.) For their part, New Englanders, most famously Rogers’ Rangers, paddled north to return the favour. One of the few routes from the St. Lawrence valley to Vermont was up the St. Francis River and its tributaries, and that was still the case in 1798 when Elmore Cushing navigated some fifty miles up the St. Francis to settle on land near a spot first called the Front Village of Shipton and which was later re-named Richmond. (Cushing and his group had first made their way to Montreal before setting off for the Townships.) Those who didn’t come by river came on foot through virgin forests.

In 1808, a decade after Cushing’s arrival, an ambitious and vigorous eighteen-year old left his home in Woodstock, Vermont and made his way to Stanstead, across the border in Lower Canada, and then to Melbourne, across the river from Richmond, where he lived the remainder of his life. His legal work took him to all corners of the Eastern Townships, at a time when travel was slow and difficult. Despite time spent away from home, he was very prominent in, and committed to, his community. When he died at what was then a relatively ripe old age of sixty-five, Daniel Thomas, who was Frederick Coburn’s maternal grandfather, left a considerable legacy.

Daniel Thomas married four times, the first time when he was only twenty, and the last time, just two years before his death, when he was sixty-three. He fathered eleven children; six with his second wife, Hannah Tilton, and five with his Irish-born, third wife, Elizabeth Armstrong. The second to last of Daniel Thomas’s eleven children, Laura Ann Thomas, was Coburn’s mother.

Daniel Thomas either acquired or adopted the title Squire, and he assumed a role of authority and leadership in Upper Melbourne. Evelyn Coburn describes how, as Justice of the Peace, he interrupted the last duel to be fought on Melbourne soil. His legal work was likely lucrative because, in 1840, when he was a settled and prosperous man of fifty, he donated two plots of land, a half mile apart, overlooking the St. Francis, one of which became the site of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and the other, St. Andrew’s cemetery.

Frederick Coburn never knew his maternal grandfather who died sixteen years before Coburn was born, but he would have grown up keenly aware that, on his mother’s side, he came from a family of some distinction. It is not known if Coburn knew his paternal grandfather, William, who was a Scottish immigrant listed in a mid-century census as one of three blacksmiths then working in Upper Melbourne. The blacksmith had at least one son, Newlands—likely a family name, though one which would have had a particular resonance for newly arrived immigrants. According to Evelyn Coburn, the blacksmith’s son became a storekeeper and, when Upper Melbourne was awarded its own post office in 1883, he also became the village postmaster, a position he held till just before his death in 1914.

(Curiously, on his death certificate, Newlands Coburn is named as a retired commercial traveler. Just as curious is the fact that the certificate is signed by William MacMillan, Minster at Chalmers Presbyterian Church in Richmond. Newlands Coburn’s remains were then interred in St. Anne’s Anglican Cemetery in Richmond, where his wife had been buried twenty-three years before. Given the proximity of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church to the Coburn home, and especially