Finding a Little Bit of Quebec City in Toronto

Here’s something a little different.

If you’re looking for Quebec City outside of Quebec City, there’s a wonderful place to find it at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

Walking through the AGO, we came across a gallery devoted to the work of Cornelius Krieghoff, and suddenly we were looking at places we knew.

There was Montmorency Falls.

There were views of Quebec City itself.

And there were wonderful scenes of winter, sleighs, people traveling through the snow and everyday life around Quebec in the 1850s.

For anyone who spends a lot of time in Quebec City, it’s a little surreal.

Krieghoff wasn’t born in Quebec. He was born in Amsterdam in 1815 and eventually made his way to Canada. But Quebec City became an important part of both his life and his work. He lived there for much of the period from 1853 to 1864, and returned again near the end of his life.

That means many of the paintings you’re looking at were created by someone who was actually living in and around Quebec City more than 160 years ago.

And that’s what we liked most about seeing them.

Seeing Familiar Places in the 1850s

You can stand in front of a painting of Montmorency Falls from 1853 and recognize it immediately.

The falls are still one of the places we tell people to visit today. They’re still just outside Quebec City. They’re still dramatic.

But instead of a cable car, visitors and tour buses, you’re looking at the landscape through the eyes of an artist seeing it in the middle of the 19th century.

The same thing happens with Krieghoff’s views of Quebec City.

You recognize the geography. You see the St. Lawrence. You see the cliffs and the shape of the city.

But everything around those familiar landmarks has changed.

That’s the fun of it.

It’s almost like finding old photographs of a place you know well—except these aren’t photographs. They’re paintings, and Krieghoff was also a storyteller. He painted dramatic landscapes and scenes of daily life that appealed to people who wanted images of Canada.

So we wouldn’t treat every detail as a literal historical record.

But the collection gives you a wonderful sense of how Quebec and the Quebec City region were being seen and portrayed in the 1850s and 1860s.

There Are a Lot More Than We Expected

This also isn’t a case of the AGO having one Krieghoff tucked away in a corner.

The AGO’s Thomson Collection includes 145 paintings by Cornelius Krieghoff.

So once you start looking, you can spend quite a bit of time with him.

There are landscapes, winter scenes, rural life and paintings involving both European settlers and Indigenous people. There are also several scenes and landscapes that will immediately mean more to you if you know Quebec.

We went to the Art Gallery of Ontario because we were in Toronto.

We didn’t expect it to turn into a Quebec City history lesson.

But sometimes that’s the fun of traveling.

You walk into a museum hundreds of miles away and suddenly find yourself looking at Montmorency Falls and Quebec City in the 1850s.

If you’re a Quebec City person and you happen to be in Toronto, it’s absolutely worth looking for Krieghoff while you’re at the AGO.

It’s a surprisingly nice way to see a little bit of Quebec City when you’re nowhere near home.