Cornelius David Krieghoff

Cornelius Krieghoff was not only a genre painter, but also one of Canada's first landscape painters - with a predilection for autumn and winter in particular. He is best known for his detailed depictions of the lives of the 'habitants' (French Canadians) and Indigenous peoples, particularly those of Caughnawaga (Kahnawake) and Lorette (Wendake). 

Born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1815, Krieghoff spent most of his youth in Germany, where he studied botany, music and painting. At the age of 22, he embarked for America, where his brother Ernst was already living, and enlisted as a volunteer artist in the United States Army, which was then embroiled in the Florida War. After receiving his discharge in 1840, he settled briefly in Rochester, then in Toronto and finally in the Montreal region with his wife, a French-Canadian woman he had met in New York, who gave birth to a daughter the following year. Krieghoff painted peasant subjects that were not very popular with the Montreal bourgeoisie; to earn a living, he did signage and portrait commissions, as well as various odd jobs. In 1951, he met John Budden, an auctioneer in Quebec City, who was to prove decisive: two years later, Budden convinced him to move once again. It was then that his career really took off. Budden introduced Krieghoff to the elite of the old capital. The English officers stationed at the Citadel, in particular, were fond of his cheap and colourful paintings, which they brought back as souvenirs. 

While he was living in Québec City, an important part of Cornelius Krieghoff’s oeuvre was the depiction of French-Canadian country people known as habitants. With great affection for his newfound compatriots, he captured their plucky, industrious nature as well as their enthusiasm for simple pleasures. He produced a significant body of work over the course of his years in the region and is now considered among the most important documentarians of nineteenth-century culture. Probably towards the end of the 1860s, Krieghoff joined his daughter in Chicago, where he died in 1872. His prolific body of work was the subject of a major travelling retrospective exhibition entitled “Krieghoff: Images of Canada”, organised by the Art Gallery of Ontario in the early 2000s.