Charles C. Hill. John Vanderpant Photographs. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canda, 1976.

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The Early Photographs

John Vanderpant's work of the twenties clearly falls into the pictorial mode of the international salons. The sensuous Head of a Girl (plate 8) is a figure-type reminiscent of the romantic paintings of the French artist Jean Jacques Henner (1829-1905). The blurred focus creates a sense of mystery and otherworldliness, the light falling on her forehead while the rest of her body is bathed in rich shadows.

Many of Vanderpant's subjects from this period

were urban and labour scenes, recalling the paintings of the British artist Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956). He interpreted the beauty of daily life: a shoe-black reading a newspaper, light mistily shining through laundry hanging in the backyard or across the crowds and horses in a courtyard (see plates 1, 5, 6). The titles were often romantic and wistful (sometimes reminiscent of Stieglitz's titles) and reflected his early interest in poetry. Vanderpant's primary concern, however, was with the arrangement of light and shadow, as in Window's Pattern (plate 2) and A Man's Portrait (plate 3), where the light creates geometric patterns. This angular composition, with the light shining across the image from the side, is characteristic of his early work.

Using a 6.5 by 9 cm, folding Ansco camera, roll film and a soft-focus anistagmatic lens, Vanderpant enlarged the negatives, printing on lightly sepia-toned silver bromide paper to create a rich tonal quality. Though the negatives for his pictorial work were rarely retouched, he would crop them and print only details of the exposed image.

In 1922 Vanderpant began exhibiting his photographs at international salons throughout the world and met with great success. In addition to winning all the prizes at local exhibitions, he also received at least ten bronze, seven silver, and four gold medals in exhibitions in Canada, England, France, Estonia, Spain, the Netherlands, and Java during the period 1922-1926. As he wrote later, he could weigh his medals by the pound and paper a room with the certificates. The British annual, Photograms of the Year, in 1923 reproduced the first of many Vanderpant photographs, Eve Every Time (1918), a study of his daughter Catharina. He was elected a contributing member of the Pittsburgh Salon of Photographic Art in 1926 and a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain that same year. A solo exhibition of his photographs at the London galleries of the Royal Photographic Society in July 1925 was well received and the exhibition later toured smaller centres in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.

Vanderpant did not confine his energies solely to his commercial and pictorial work. At the annual provincial exhibition of 1920, he inaugurated the New Westminster Photographic Salon which became an international salon in l923. He was vice-chairman of the art committee at the exhibition in 1922 and chairman in 1924, a position he held until 1927. He was also an executive member of the B.C. Art League, an association formed to promote the construction of an

art gallery in Vancouver. He became vice-president of the Photographers Association of the Pacific North West in 1922 and the following year addressed their annual convention in Victoria. In 1924 he lectured on studio ethics and pictorial photography at the national convention of the Photographers Association of America in Milwaukee. His concern in both these talks was the ethical side of the photographic business and salons, stressing the need for a scientific, noncompetitive attitude to photographic creation and for a higher quality of work.

In the spring of 1926 John Vanderpant entered into a partnership with Harold Mortimer-Lamb to open the Vanderpant Galleries at 1216 Robson Street in Vancouver. The Galleries were organized as a photographic studio and art and antique gallery and, though the partnership only lasted a year, Vanderpant maintained the Galleries with exhibitions of contemporary art and photography soon replacing the antiques. This arrangement also allowed Vanderpant more time for his pictorial work.

While the 1925 exhibition in London had received favourable comments, some reviewers had remarked upon the lack of national character in his photographs (possibly in light of the favourable press reaction to the work of the Group of Seven at Wembley in 1924). In response to this criticism, Vanderpant turned from the Brangwyn-like labour scenes to his Canadian environment. He isolated the grain elevators in Vancouver harbour as the embodiment of his attitudes to his adopted country, and the dynamic commercial spirit of the West was reflected in the titles he gave these images: Temple of Trade, Colonnades of Commerce (plate 10) and Grain and Lumber (plate 12). The French architect Le Corbusier (1867-1965) had already identified the grain elevator as America's most significant contribution to architecture for its unified expression of the engineer's mathematical precision and purpose." In Vanderpant's photographs the elevators are massive, dominating the forms below, and he used the light to accentuate their cylindrical rhythm while suppressing details in flowing surfaces of textured black.

Vanderpant was already familiar with the work of the new national art movement, the Group of Seven, their paintings having been shown at the 1922 New Westminster Provincial Exhibition. In 1926 this connection with the Group was strengthened by the arrival in Vancouver of Fred Varley (1881-1969) who had come west with his family to teach at the new Vancouver School of Decorative & Applied Arts. Varley and

Vanderpant soon became close friends; with camera and palette they discovered the natural beauty of British Columbia, "the simplicity of form in the grandeur of the mountains,"" the quiet ruggedness of the coves and mountain railways, and the austere silhouettes of the burnt-over hills (see plates 13, 14). Many years later Vanderpant wrote, "Canada.. . has made me. I feel one with the spaces, the mountains, the atmosphere of British Columbia, and directly reflecting upon this love of country rests my expressive work."

Vanderpant was always at the core of new expressive developments in Vancouver in photography and other art forms. He had a specially designed music room in his Galleries where he held musical evenings for friends and students of the art school. The B.C. Art League and the Vancouver Poetry Society organized regular meetings in his rooms and, in the spring of 1927, a master salon of pictorial photography (the first such salon in Vancouver) was held at the Galleries under the auspices of the B.C. Pictorialists. Fred Varley's paintings were hung in the studio for the education of clients as well as for the potentiality of sales. He showed the work of Charles Scott (1896-1964) at the Galleries in 1928 and, at the time of the opening of the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1931, an exhibition of modern British Columbian painting was held to bring to the attention of the Art Gallery directors the validity of the local artistic expression. In 1927, when the paintings of the Group of Seven exhibited at the Vancouver Provincial Exhibition were attacked in the press, Vanderpant rallied to their defence, "The law of desire for artistic expression remains the same intellectual force behind all human creation, the form only changes .... The men of the School of Seven... felt that the immensity of Canada could not be truly painted with a European brush, that it would be futile to draw detail in landscapes of force and immensity, so they did away with cultivated prettiness and went for the soul of the land in the ruggedness of form, the rhythm of line and color, by simplicity and directness of stroke and elimination. Creative encounters with like-minded people led Vanderpant to produce some of the few portraits he ever exhibited as pictorial work. Fred Varley's painting The Immigrants (c. 1923) forms the background of his portrait (see plate 15), taken when Eric Brown, Director of the National Gallery, visited Emily Carr in the summer of l927. The portrait of Rabindranath Tagore

(see plate 16), the Indian writer and philosopher, dates from the spring of 1929 and the study of Vera Weatherbie (see plate 21), Fred Varley's model and star pupil, from a year later. Unlike A Man's Portrait (plate 3), Tagore and Vera are not just interesting objects in the landscape of the room. They dominate the image, filling the frame, their gentleness emanating from the subtle contact between subject and photographer. Vera's habit (a costume from an art school pageant) frames the face, the lighting and soft focus accentuating her tender sensuality. Varley's portrait of Vera, Head of a Girl, (fig. 2) in the same costume demonstrates the contrast between the evanescent quality of the photograph and the plasticity of paint.

Exhibitions of Vanderpant's work toured the United States and Britain in 1928, but he slowly withdrew from the circuit of pictorial salons. His attitudes to his art and pictoridalism were changing: When it was felt that attention to the outside was not so important as that to the inside my work grew from popular romanticism to aesthetic expression." His solo exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society galleries in London in 1928 was not well received. The conservative critic F.C. Tilney, in a review filled with snobbery, criticized Vanderpant for his prosaic subjects and gloom, his rejection of tradition and for his striving after pattern at the expense of atmospheric effects." In his reply to these criticisms Vanderpant stressed the necessity of subjective interpretation and explained his effort to express his vision, 'Canada is not beautiful in detail but by the immensities of its proportions, the tragic of its forms and contrasts .... This rudeness, this immensity and tragic unfoldment one tries to express in extreme simplicity of composition, form strength, obvious contrast in light and shade. One is not looking for gloom, but rather dramatic strength, not for luminosity in shadows...but for the forms, contrasts, proportions and designs which belong to Canada and to no other country."

In May of 1929, Vanderpant visited Ottawa and Toronto and held exhibitions of his work in both cities. While in Toronto he took the famous photograph of the Group of Seven seated at lunch in the Arts & Letters Club (fig. 3).

Nineteen twenty-nine was also a year of experimentation and great creativity for Vanderpant. He explored new avenues, new approaches to photography. From a balcony in the Royal York Hotel in Toronto he looked down at the stacked restaurant chairs and tables; the result was The Morning After (plate 17).

Similarly, in The Valve (plate 18) and Heart of the Cabbage (plate 19), he confined and isolated forms so that, at first glance, they appear to be patterns of light and dark or straight lines and curves without any relation to their actual subject. In Elevator Pattern (plate 20) he aimed his camera straight up, fragmenting the image so that it is no longer static but a dynamic interplay of form and light.

The exploitation of odd-angle perspectives for pattern effects dates back to the 1912 photograph Octopus (a "sky-scraper" view of paths in a park), by Alvin Landgon Coburn (1882-1966), and was further developed by the Hungarian, André Kertesz (b. 1894), and Germany's Albert Renger-Patzch (1897-1966) in the twenties. In the latter's book of 1928, Die Welt ist Schön, plants and industrial objects were arranged and photographed close-up or at extreme angles to create abstracted compositions. However, unlike the European photographers, Vanderpant still used a soft focus to create an over-all effect, softening the definition of form.

Some of the breakthroughs of 1929 were not explored fully for several years. Possibly due to the demands of the commission, the subjects and tonal qualities of the work Vanderpant produced on a six-week trip across Canada for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1930 (see plates 22 to 25) show little stylistic development from his photographs of 1926.

10. Colonnades of Commerce 1926