A Signed Photograph of Mrs. Walter (Mary) Buchanan by Mortimer Cropper
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The signed photograph of Mrs. Walter (Mary) Buchanan reproduced on the facing page is taken from the opening pages of Country Breezes from Breezy Brae, the volume in which her acknowledged masterpiece, Piggy, was first published. Unaccountably overlooked by the editors of both the Canardian Poetry Press edition of Piggy and the Snorton Critical Edition of the poem, the signed photograph is reproduced here so that admirers of Buchanan and her work can gain an enlarged and broadened sense of the person behind the poems. Like the engraving of Charles Heavysege reproduced by Sandra Campbell in a previous number of Canadian Poetry,1 the signed photograph of Buchanan is very evidently modelled on the Venetian half-length portraits that also lie behind such landmarks of nineteenth-century painting as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (The Kissed Mouth,) and Lady Lilith (Body’s Beauty). Just as evidently, it also carries something of the ambivalent sexual charge of these paintings—a combination of pneumatic invitingness and stern coldness that is simultaneously attractive and discouraging.2 This cathartic quality is subtly reflected and reinforced not only by the tension between the delicate necklace that outlines the amplitude of the sitter’s bodice and the dark pin that focuses the viewer’s attention on the almost clerical austerity of her collar, but also by the contrast between the soft background of the portrait and the hard-edged frame in which it is enclosed. Part likeness and part fantasy, the signed photograph of Mrs. Walter (Mary) Buchanan is a luminous icon that anticipates the modernistically bifurcated images of female complexity that adorn the front and back covers of Margaret Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie and Dorothy Livesay’s Collected Poems: the Two Seasons. Here, in the words of the classical poet, |
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"totum dependeat" existsin tense balance with "gero rem imperialem," "magister Mundi sum" with "estne volumen in toga, an solum tibi libet videre?"3 The sophisticated iconography of the Buchanan photograph suggests that it might be the work of a Toronto or Clinton photographer (and, thus, date from the time of Buchanan’s recently documented relationship with Charles G.D. Roberts).4 However, its clear resemblance in texture as well as presentation to other photographs in Country Breezes from Breezy Brae—particularly "The Heather Hills," "Our Mother’s Grave," "Farmers, Plant a Tree," and the illustration to Piggy5—indicate a photographer in either Clarksburg, Thornhill, Ravenna, Collingwood, or one of the other local centres whose fairs, picnics, and fowl suppers Buchanan evidently attended and enjoyed.6 |
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Notes
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Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970. Buchanan, Mrs. Walter. Country Breezes from Breezy Brae. Thornbury: Beaver Valley, [c. 1915]. Buchanan, Mrs. Walter. Piggy. Ed. Ursula Hogg-Reave. Snorton Critical Edition. Galt: Press Porképic, 1996; rpt. London: Canadian Poetry Press, 1999. Campbell, Sandra. "The Face of Charles Heavysege." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, 35 (Fall/Winter 1994): 102-03. Livesay, Dorothy. Collected Poems: the Two Seasons. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972. Obscurus, Podex. Lyrics, Odes and Ars Poetica. Trans. A.M. Young. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard UP; London: William Heinemann, 1984. |
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