Smiths Falls owes much of its early visual history to the building of the Rideau Canal which started in the late 1820s. The artists who created the watercolours presented in this brief exhibit sought to document this ambitious military defence program for official administrative reasons.

James Pattison Cockburn, John Burrows, and William T. Clegg were among those artists who recorded this remarkable engineering feat.

Today their watercolours which date around the 1830s and 1840s can also be appreciated for depicting Smiths Falls in its first decades of settlement and development.

References

Glenn J. Lockwood. "Smiths Falls: A Social History of the Men and Women in a Rideau Canal Community 1794-1994." Smiths Falls: Corporation of the Town of Smiths Falls, 1994.

Passfield, Robert W. Building the Rideau Canal: A Pictorial History. Don Mills, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1982.