Client
Gardiner Museum
Scope of Work
Marketing creative for the exhibition Obsession: Sir William Van Horne’s Japanese Ceramics. Using Van Horne’s own meticulous watercolour illustrations, I created a large collage that illustrates the vastness of his collection as well as the extent of his obsession.
About the Exhibition
October 20, 2018 – January 20, 2019 // The opening of Japan after 1854 sparked a fashion in the West for collecting Japanese objets d’art including ceramics. Some scholars and dealers soon became fascinated by the bowls, jars, and vases made for domestic use rather than export, seeing them as more authentic. Sir William Van Horne became passionate about these modest pots, assembling a collection of over 1,200 examples.
This exhibition reunites for the first time what survives of Van Horne’s collection, alongside his exacting watercolors, elaborately annotated notebooks, letters, and related archival material. Together, these artifacts offer a remarkable case study in the history of collecting in late-19th century Montreal, highlighting Van Horne’s place in an international network of connoisseurs and the imperialist impulses behind his taxonomic acquisitiveness. Above all, they reveal the little-known obsession of one of the greatest collectors in Canadian history.
