Travel Notes and Photographs of Edmund Demers

Part I: Introduction and Photos of Québec City

Edmund Demers, c. 1950-55.

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Preface

This blog was created to share the travel notes of Odelie Demers and Télesphore Demers written on their trips to Québec in 1898 and 1908 and to annotate the notes with related photographs and comments on the people and events mentioned in them. I am very pleased, however, to be adding another travel journal to the blog, one written by Edmund Demers, a member of the third generation of the Demers family to live in the United States. Edmund is a grandson of Télesphore and a nephew of Odelie.

Edmund Demers with his grandfather Télesphore Demers, circa 1930.

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It is particularly appropriate to include Edmund’s travel notes because it is to him primarily that we owe our awareness of the notes of his grandfather and aunt. After learning about the handwritten notes from his cousin Oline Doiron, Edmund translated the journals into English in 1990 and distributed them to some of his first cousins. More recently, he has helped me tremendously in producing the corrected and annotated French transcripts and with my own English translations of the journals. You can read more about Edmund’s work on his translations in 1990 and on his help with the blog in his guest post, "The Revival of the Travel Notes . . . and of my French," which he wrote at the start of the blog.

Like his grandfather Télesphore, who lived to the age of 102, Edmund has enjoyed a long life. He is now 98 and continues to help me with the blog and my research on the family’s history.

Edmund at the polls. Election Day, November 2018.

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Introduction to Québec Photographs

Edmund, the son of Odias “Pete” Demers and Éva Dionne, was born in Sanford, Maine, in 1920 and grew up speaking both French and English fluently. He was educated in the Saint Ignatius Parish elementary school and at Sanford High School where he graduated in 1937. He then attended Vesper George School of Art, a commercial art school in Boston where he graduated in June 1941. After working for a short time, he entered the U.S. Army in June 1942 and served for 42 months. After the war, he attended the Yale School of Fine Arts and graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts. Upon graduating from Yale, he was an instructor of drawing and composition at Catholic University in Washington D.C. While at Catholic University he also studied for a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting, which he received in 1951. Much later, in 1970, he received a Ph.D. in Comparative Arts from Ohio University.

After graduating from Catholic University, Edmund lived in Québec City from the fall of 1951 to the spring of 1952.  Renting a room at a boarding house on Rue Saint-Geneviève in the Upper Town, he devoted his time to painting and other art work. His stay in Québec City would be his last foreign travel before a tour of France and western Europe in 1956.

Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, October 1951.

Taken shortly after Edmund’s arrival in the city from his second story room 

at the boarding house on Avenue Saint-Geneviève, across from Rue Brébeuf.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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His stay in Québec was not his first foreign travel, or even his first time in Québec Province. As a child, he went with his parents on several occasions by automobile to visit his mother's family, the Dionnes, who lived on a dairy farm in Sherbrooke. But his first significant travel outside the country was to India and western China, including flights over the “Hump” of the Himalayas, when he served as a meteorologist for the U.S. Army Air Corp.

Beginning in the fall of 1952, Edmund was a professor of art and painting at Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa. He later taught at Eisenhower College in Seneca Falls, New York, from 1965 until his retirement in the early 1980s.

By the time he traveled to Québec in 1951, his art work had been recognized and shown in a number of venues, including a Smithsonian Display of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C. (for his painting “Madonna and Child”) and the Corcoran Gallery in New York City (where he received an honorable mention for his painting “Pisces”). In November 1949, his painting of a nativity scene gained one of 70 money prizes in a contest among 5,000 artists from France and the United States that was sponsored by the Hallmark Card Company. This painting was shown in the Wildenstein Gallery in New York City and was reproduced in full color in the December 25, 1950 edition of Time Magazine: (for the article) http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/vault/1950/12/19501225/40/1550.jpg; (for paintings:   http://time.com/vault/issue/1950-12-25/page/41/); (for Edmund's painting) http://time.com/vault/issue/1950-12-25/page/42/.

Edmund Demers at his parents home with his prize-winning painting, "Nativity," 

in the Hallmark Card Company Competition in 1949. Circa 1950.

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Photographs 

We have no letters or journals written by Edmund during his time in Québec City in 1951-52, but we are fortunate to have a number of photographs which document his stay there, some of which are published below with his permission. Although Edmund never considered himself to be a photographer, the photos certainly demonstrate his artistic sensibilities. Many of the photos show a Québec City that has remained remarkably unchanged in physical appearance, but all of these photographs are of the Upper Town. The photos of the Lower Town, on the other hand, show a very different district, one before all the renovations over the last few decades that have emphasized the French origins of the city and that have made the Lower Town so appealing today.

Unfortunately, Edmund no longer has any of the pictures he painted while in Québec, but has a few photos of them, like the cityscape of an area around the Rue des Remparts shown immediately below. He has told me how much he has always liked this painting; it is one of his favorites. It has been decades since he last saw it, and he does not remember who he sold or gave it to. Based on a conversation I had with him about its color scheme in a general way, my daughter, Kate, colorized the photograph. In a conversation with him as he held the colorized photo in his hand and pointed out some of the details of the painting - particularly the many vertical and horizontal lines created by the varied elevations of the land and of the built environment - he said that the reproduced colors were a good rendition of the original, and then said that when he first saw the scene on rue des Remparts that he had to paint it - "it was irresistible!"

View of Québec City:

Maison Montcalm, Rue des Remparts, left, Côte de la Canoterie, center,
and Côte du Colonel Dambourgès, right.

 Painting by Edmund Demers, circa 1951-52.

Black and White photograph of original color painting (1951-52) by Edmund Demers.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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View of Québec City:

Maison Montcalm, Rue des Remparts, left, left, Côte de la Canoterie, center,
and Côte du Colonel Dambourgès, right.

Black and White photograph of original color painting (1951-52) by Edmund Demers.

Colorized by Kate Doiron.

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Views of the Upper Town

Place de l'Hôtel de Ville.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Rue des Jardins and Price Building.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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View of Côte de la Fabrique toward Notre Dame Cathedral.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Notre-Dame Cathedral.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Gun Emplacement, Rue des Remparts, not far from where Edmund painted the cityscape above of the Maison Montcalm.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Rue des Remparts, view toward the east, 

taken from the gun emplacement in front of Maison Montcalm.
Edmund painted his picture above the wall at right.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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View of Upper Town from Parc de Bastion-de-la-Reine. 

Intersection of Rue D’Auteuil and Avenue Sainte-Geneviève, center-left. 

Houses on Avenue Saint-Denis, upper-right.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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View of Upper Town from Parc de Bastion-de-la-Reine. 

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Town houses, perhaps in the Upper Town.

 (Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Views of the Lower Town

View of Tenement Buildings on Laundry Day in the Lower Town.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Silhouettes, Lower Town, Québec City.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Tenements, Lower Town.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Lower Town.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Church, Place Royale.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Maison Canac dit Marquis, at right. Côte de la Montagne.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Lower Town.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Rue Saint-Paul.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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Unknown man on Québec waterfront.

(Photo: Courtesy of Edmund Demers)

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