Colin S. MacDonald fonds: Finding Aid

Born in Ottawa, Colin S. MacDonald received his early education there and in Kitchener, Ontario. As a mid-career civil servant in Ottawa, he decided to resign from his government job and work more or less full-time on a biographical dictionary of Canadian artists. His inspiration came in the 1960s, when he discovered an international dictionary of artists. Although partial dictionaries already existed, either chronological (early painters and printmakers) or geographical (Saskatchewan artists), nothing had previously been attempted across the board for Canadian visual artists. Not trained as an art historian, MacDonald worked primarily from the documentation files maintained in the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives supported by extensive correspondence with individual artists and their representatives or relatives. Over the years, his commitment has been extraordinary. Although he received some government grants, he subsidized his project through personal loans, selling his own artwork as well as selling portions of his own fine arts library. The dictionary offers over 6000 biographies of living and dead Canadian visual artists and sculptors with a reference list for further information on each artist. The resource comes in eight volumes totaling over 3000 pages. After several decades of industrious research and writing, with volumes from A to Smith already published, ill health and advancing years obliged MacDonald to hand on the project to others to complete. The NGC completed the project by compiling biographical entries from Smith to Z. In 2009, these entries together with those complied by MacDonald were added to Artists in Canada, an online resource supported by the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) that lists documentation files on Canadian artists held by twenty-three libraries and archives across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives.

Scope and Content

The Colin S. MacDonald fonds contains both a correspondence series and a dictionary draft entries series. The correspondence files include decades of materials exchanged between the author and the artists or their representatives from which he created biographies. The dictionary drafts are simply that, drafts of the entries for the artists he included. Each of these series is described in the following pages along with Box Lists to reflect individual files.

Source of supplied title proper: Title based on contents of fonds.

Immediate source of acquisition: Colin S. MacDonald.

Physical description: Other material includes b&w photographs, colour photographs and drawings.

Language: Text is mainly in English. Some items are in French.

Finding aids: Series level descriptions and box list available.

Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

Contact Information

Reference Services
Library and Archives
National Gallery of Canada
380 Sussex Drive
Ottawa, Ontario
K1N 9N4

T 613-714-6000 ext. 6323

[email protected]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Colin S. MacDonald fonds:

Finding Aid

Collection Summary

Biographical Sketch

Scope and Content

Organization of the Collection

Index Terms

Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

Contact Information

Series Level Descriptions

Correspondence Series. – 1960-2007. – 1.36 m of textual records and other material.

Dictionary Entry Draft Series. – 1960-2007. – 64 cm of textual records.

Series 1 - Correspondence Series

Series 2 - Dictionary Entry Draft Series