Imagining Paradise: The Visual Depiction of Pre-Deportation Acadia, 1850-2000

Abstract

There is a widely-held interpretation that l’ancienne Acadie was something of an earthly paradise. That idealized interpretation dates back to, and was heavily influenced by, the writings of Dièreville in 1699 and Abbé Raynal in 1770. The idea came to a literary flowering and a worldwide audience in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie. Beginning with the first illustrated edition of Evangeline in 1850, and continuing for the next 150 years, a succession of artists offered different versions of the imagined bucolic paradise of Acadia. That body of artwork both reflected and advanced the intellectual and emotional construct that pre-deportation Acadie had been a pastoral place of peace, harmony, and plenty. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, British and American publishers commissioned British and American artists to depict scenes to accompany Evangeline. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Canadian heritage agencies commissioned Canadian artists to develop new artwork of pre-deportation Acadia, without Evangeline imagery or Evangeline-related storylines. None the less, the paintings produced in the last few decades of the twentieth century continued to offer, for the most part, variations on the basic idea that Acadie before 1755 was a time and a place that enjoyed idyllic conditions.