Portrait of Alexander Mackenzie
Alexander Mackenzie’s portrait almost never was. The portrait by J.W.L. Forster was painted from photographs, five years after the death of Mackenzie in 1892 — at a time when an average person had likely never seen a photograph of themselves. Twenty-four years later, when fire destroyed the Parliament building, the painting had to be carried out as people fled the flames.
From Laval, Quebec, Canada’s second Prime Minister was a man of strict principle, having even rejected Queen Victoria’s offers of knighthood, and he fittingly is posed in a plain, dark, suit, at work in a darkened room.