Article
Provincial hoplology: Collecting arms and armour in Ontario, 1850–1950
Journal of the History of Collections
(2007)
Abstract
Upper Canada (Ontario) never had a medieval past to glorify with the display of arms and armour, but to its populace, conscious of their legacy as heirs to the British Empire, that display seemed sufficiently important to merit encouragement from the earliest days of the Province. In Toronto, although some influential nineteenth-century residents had collections of armour, its collection and display from the earliest days essentially were tied to education. The Toronto Normal School incorporated arms and armour into its history teaching collection, and after the School's failure, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) built arguably the third-best public armour collection in North America. Unique in this collection, however, was the rhetoric of utility and especially of industrial design: Charles Trick Currelly, the ROM's first director, argued that arms and armour should be seen as finely made functional art of the past that would inspire fine functional art for the present. This philosophy, derived and elaborated from the South Kensington model, also saw the role of armour as a cornerstone to the educational mission of the museum. This educational emphasis begun under Currelly remains strong, despite waxing and waning emphasis on arms and armour in the museum as a whole.
Disciplines
Publication Date
March 21, 2007
DOI
10.1093/jhc/fhm004
Publisher Statement
© The Author 2007. Publisher's version of record: https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhm004
Citation Information
Steven A. Walton. "Provincial hoplology: Collecting arms and armour in Ontario, 1850–1950" Journal of the History of Collections Vol. 19 Iss. 1 (2007) p. 89 - 114 ISSN: 0954-6650 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/steven-walton/5/