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home > local hauntings > "The Phantom of the Snow"

local hauntings

"The Phantom of the Snow"

by William Blair Bruce
(1859-1906)
1888; oil on canvas; 15.11 cm x 192.1 cm, 1914

Location:
Art Gallery of Hamilton
Bruce Memorial
Hamilton, Ontario

In a desolate snowy landscape lit by the eerie light of the moon, a man with snowshoes lashed to his back falls in the snow and reaches toward a phantom striding by, apparently indifferent to his plight.

Does the phantom represent a hoped-for saviour or the shadow of death?

In a letter to his mother, William Blair Bruce identified his inspiration as C.D. Shanly's poem Walker in the Snow, thus clarifying the phantom's sinister mission:

"For I saw by the sickly moonlight, / That the walking of the stranger / Left no footprints in the snow /...I had seen the shadow hunter / And had withered in his blight."

Bruce painted this work (also known as The Phantom Hunter) at a time when the Canadian press was calling for the establishment of a national art imbued with Canadian themes. In correspondence with his mother, he reported his pride in the acceptance of this subject at the Paris Salon of 1888. It was Bruce's second start as an artist in Paris.

In 1881, he had studied at the Académie Julian and at Barbizon, a village south of Paris, but his work from this period was lost in a shipwreck in the St. Lawrence in 1885. Returning to France in 1887, he spent time in Giverny, where, in the company of other Canadian, American and Scandinavian artists, he painted en plein air, directly from nature, using Impressionist techniques to render the landscape.

Bruce brings art to Hamilton
_____________________________

William Blair Bruce died on November 17th of 1906 at the young age of 47 from heart disease.

After his demise, William's father and widow donated 29 paintings to the city of Hamilton with the sole request of building a suitable gallery to house them. It would be in 1913 the city finaly found space, in the original public library building.

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