Inside the Museums - Mackenzie House by Goddard John;

Author:Goddard, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2014-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Main Floor, Front Parlour

The main floor, the most formal area of the house, features front and back parlours that were reserved for special occasions and guests.

In the front parlour hangs a far different portrait of Mackenzie from the one in the gallery. This one is unsigned, the artist unknown. It shows Mackenzie in the mid-to-late 1820s, when he was mayor of Toronto or slightly afterward, and when portrait artists were hard to come by. A stiff collar constrains his neck. His eyes stare straight at the viewer — not fiercely and passionately, but timidly and self-consciously. He looks almost ready to smile.

On the same wall hangs a matching portrait of Mackenzie’s wife, the former Isabel Baxter, the only known image of her. Compared to her husband, she appears assertive, filling the frame better than he does and engaging the viewer with more confidence and composure.

On the opposite wall hangs a portrait of John Montgomery, Mackenzie’s long-time friend, fellow rebel, and owner of the tavern that served as rebel headquarters. Montgomery was captured in the Rebellion and imprisoned for months. On conviction, he was shipped to Fort Henry at Kingston. He escaped, fled to the United States, and later returned to again become a tavern owner. An admirer, like Mackenzie, of U.S. representative government, Montgomery appears in the portrait with what looks to be a copy of either the U.S. Constitution or U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Few heirlooms other than the portraits can be traced directly to the Mackenzies. An exception is the high-backed slipper chair at the foot of the William Lyon Mackenzie portrait. Covering it is a piece of embroidery sewn sometime around 1870 by the Mackenzies’ daughter Janet, who lived nearby as the wife of Charles Lindsey, a journalist and Mackenzie’s first biographer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.