Companion and Comparison Views

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One hundred years ago, the Yarmouth Steamship Company's tourist publication, Beautiful Nova Scotia: The Ideal Summer Land, described the capital city of Halifax as a thriving and picturesque community with about 45,00 inhabitants. The writer noted that

From the summit of Fort George, better known as Citadel Hill, a superb view of the city, the harbor and the surrounding country may be obtained. The older portion of the town lies between it and the water, and the straight cross-streets lead the eye down to the harbor, where vessels bearing the flags of all nations are at anchor. On a clear, sunny morning the scene is one of the prettiest sights imaginable. To the north, shimmering in the summer sun and specked with the wings of pleasure boats, lie the bright waters of Bedford Basin, into which the harbor opens out after passing through the Narrows. To the east are the low hills on the Dartmouth side, and George's Island, green and well-kept... Below and around [Citadel Hill] are the buildings of the town, with here and there a spire rising from among green foliage.

Regardless of the changes which a century has brought to the urban landscape, the view from Citadel Hill remains a perennial attraction. This particular vantage point, as well as those offered by other strategic locations around the Halifax Peninsula — Fort Needham, Cowie Hill, Georges Island and the Dartmouth shoreline — inspired various eighteenth and nineteenth-century landscape artists passing through the area. Whereas most of British North America remained primeval forest, open prairie or mere clearings in the bush through the last half of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, Halifax was ideal for townscape painting.

Artists such as Richard Short, Edward Hicks, John Elliott Woolford, R.S.M. Bouchette, Robert Petley, William Egar and William Bartlett — to mention only a few — have left us with a legacy of panoramas and street-scapes, beginning in 1759 and carrying through to the mid-nineteenth century. Probably the most impressive views of Halifax, however, are not the landscape renderings, but instead the large photographic panoramas taken from the eastern side of Citadel Hill by the Notman Studio in 1883 and again ca. 1892.

Spectacular as the panorama views are, by their very nature they exclude the human figure. Even the earlier urban vistas and streetscapes dwarf the inhabitants of Halifax, almost losing them within the vast openness of the young community. It is only with the development of modern photography that the people of the city are — collectively and individually — brought clearly into focus, for they are both a part of the changing cityscape and its most distinctive, enduring feature.