“A few of my humble pen scratchings”: John Howard Willis and Alexandre Vattemare

This article presents a critical study of the work of John Howard Willis, writer, artist, and inhabitant of Quebec City, and traces his meeting with Alexandre Vattemare, French ventriloquist and philanthropist of renown. In early 1841, during his stay in Quebec City, Vattemare collected at least 13 of Willis’s watercolours portraying Indigenous and local people in Lower Canada, four of which are now in the McCord Stewart Museum collection. While Willis’s writing has received limited attention, his work as an artist, and what was likely a project of some ambition linked to these watercolours, have remained unknown for over 175 years. Willis stated that the watercolours were objective documents of Indigenous dress, but a thorough investigation of them, along with a critical reading of his texts representing Indigenous people, suggests otherwise. This article argues instead that they are creations and transmitters of notions inherent in a deeply ingrained social imaginary in nineteenth-century Lower Canada, whose basic assumptions persist in Canada to this day.