James Hamilton Illustrations

Constance Martin, from notes accompanying her Glenbow Museum exhibit, Calgary, Canada, 1983:

“Exactly why Kane chose Hamilton as his illustrator is unknown. Certainly, Hamilton’s romantic pictorial style with its emphasis on sweeping grandeur was well suited to the intentions of Kane and his publisher to produce a popular, centre-table book.There is an indication that Kane may have had Hamilton in mind before the first expedition even returned in 1851. In a passage from his personal diary which appears in the published 1853 narrative, Kane wrote:”Let me make a picture for you without a jot of fancy about it and you (Kane’s brother) get “H” to put it into colours if you can.”

To facilitate his interpretive rendering of the hundreds of illustrative instances in Kane’s well-filled folios, Hamilton moved into Kane’s home and “for more than a month…occupied the doctor’s (Kane’s) room, that night and day might be given to their execution.”

…The Arctic watercolours included in this exhibition are only a small number of those Hamilton prepared for Kane’s two books. Although the subjects are identifiable from the explorer’s text, not all were actually included in Kane’s books. Icebergs, glaciers, vast spaces, turbulent seas and skies, warm, glowing light, refracted light and the Beechy Island graves found at Franklin’s first quarters form the dominant subject of the Arctic scenes. All evoke the sensibility of the natural sublime, particularly the strange, majestic strength of nature and the sense of human fragility set against such awesome splendour.