O-603.1

•

painting (portrait)

•

The Honourable Louis-Joseph Papineau

Portrait of Speaker Louis-Joseph Papineau

Louis-Joseph Papineau was born in Montreal in 1786, and for years he was the complicated voice of French Canadian nationalism. In 1815 he was appointed Speaker and worked to reform political institutions. He co-wrote the Ninety-Two Resolutions in 1834, and after rebellions over the lack of reform he was exiled to United States. He was granted amnesty and returned to be elected Speaker of the new Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, where he sat as an independent.

His portrait, painted posthumously by Alfred Boisseau, shows Papineau with a document held behind his back, unidentifiable, perhaps an allusion to his paradoxical nature.

Alfred Boisseau

Alfred Boisseau was born in Paris in 1823. As a young man he moved to New Orleans, and became best known for his painting Louisiana Indians Walking along a Bayou, which hangs in the New Orleans Museum of Art and is hailed as one of the great antebellum paintings of Native Americans. He painted portraits of presidents Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Grant. He later moved to Montreal and opened a photographic studio, then to Manitoba where his work included paintings of Indigenous people. He died in Buffalo in 1901.