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Dollard des Ormeaux

Bust - Adam Dollard des Ormeaux

Quebec sculptor Alfred Laliberté created this bronze bust in 1923. It was cast by Roman Bronze Works, one of the first commercial foundries in America to master the lost-wax method and make sculptures equal in quality and complexity to those produced in Europe.

The subject is Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, a 17th-century French soldier and garrison commander at the Catholic colony of Ville-Marie on the Island of Montreal. In 1660, Dollard and several men under his command died fighting Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) opponents at the battle of Long Sault, some 100 kilometres west of present-day Montreal along the Ottawa River. Traditional accounts have emphasized Dollard’s heroism and sacrifice defending Ville-Marie, while historians over the years have raised questions about the circumstances leading to the battle at Long Sault.

The bust in Parliament’s collection is predated by Laliberté’s imposing bronze statue of Dollard in Montreal’s Lafontaine Park, which was inaugurated in 1920.

Alfred Laliberté

Alfred Laliberté was born in 1878, in Sainte-Elizabeth-de-Warwick, Quebec. He showed early promise as a sculptor, and in his early twenties took classes at the Council of Arts and Manufactures in Montreal. In 1902, he went to Paris to study at the École des beaux-arts, where the sculptures of Auguste Rodin particularly influenced his work. His Young Indians Hunting received a special mention at the 1905 Salon du printemps (spring fair) in Paris and was acquired by the National Gallery of Canada. In 1910, the Government of Quebec commissioned him to create two large sculptures for the exterior of its legislative building. He was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1919 and a member of the Académie des beaux-arts de l’Institut de France in 1948. Over the course of his life, he created a thousand bronze, marble, plaster, and wooden statues. He is remembered as an accomplished sculptor whose work celebrates French-Canadian rural life and commemorates the heroes of Quebec. Laliberté died in Montreal in 1953.