In Memoriam

With the passing of Mary Macaulay Allodi on May 31, 2021, Canada lost one of its great intellectual treasures, a pioneer and pillar in the study of early Canadian art. She was also one of the most sophisticated, worldly, and generous people I have ever met. With a warm smile, a subtle sense of humor, and a sangfroid and cool demeanor, matched by an encyclopedic knowledge of Canadian art and history, she was someone I looked up to as I began to build my own career as an art historian in the 1970s.

Mary was born in Montreal in 1929 and was educated at a French Catholic boarding school, before going on to obtain an art history degree at McGill University in 1951. She developed an early interest in Goya drawings and Southern Baroque art. During a postgraduate trip to Europe with two friends, she worked briefly for a travel agency in Madrid, where she was introduced to her future husband, Federico Allodi. Returning to Canada, she was hired by the renowned art historian and author Donald Buchanan of the National Gallery of Canada and worked  there for three years. Recognizing the need to further her education, Mary completed a master’s in art history at New York University and worked for a year as a Research Assistant in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Print Department. As a recipient of a research grant awarded by the Canada Council, she spent a year in Europe in 1960 conducting research on Southern Baroque painters. She immersed herself in studies that were foundational to the development of her acute perspective on the role of art in public life.

A chance meeting with Federico Allodi in London in 1961 culminated in their marriage that year, and soon after they returned to her native Canada, settling in Toronto. Together they raised two sons, Marc and James. When their fifteen-year-old son Marc, a passionate outdoorsman, died in 1978 in a canoeing accident, life took an irredeemable turn for Mary. The unimaginable sadness, which never ended, was mitigated by renewed passion for her work as an art historian at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).

Mary’s long association with the ROM began in 1962, when she was hired as a Research Assistant in the Canadiana Department. At first it was frustrating—as she said in a 1977 interview, “How am I going to bear it? I had been used to looking at Rembrandts. You don’t exactly look for top quality in a watercolor done by a soldier engineer at Fort York. But after about two years, I stopped sighing after fine arts.” Mary immersed herself in the ROM’s Canadiana collections and in Canadian history, and began to apply her connoisseurship skills, for example, by reattributing a series of drawings supposedly by William Henry Bartlett to the English drawing master John Richard Coke Smyth in 1968. In 1974, she was responsible for the publication of the seminal two-volume set Canadian Watercolours and Drawings in the Royal Ontario Museum, hailed by renowned Canadian art historian Robert Hubbard, who, in writing about sources for early Canadian art, stated: “On several counts Mary Allodi’s two handsome volumes are the best yet. The quality of the drawings reproduced, the wealth of material made available for stylistic analysis, the competence of the attribution of unsigned drawings, the primary sources provided for the social historian, the vicarious excitement afforded the general reader by the discovery of a pristine land—all these make the book an extremely valuable contribution to Canadian studies. . . . Mary Allodi has blazed the trail.” She also contributed an essay on early Canadian prints to her colleague Donald Webster’s publication The Book of Canadian Antiques (1974). This led to her pioneering study of early Canadian printmaking, when she curated the 1980 ROM exhibition Printmaking in Canada: The Earliest Views and Portraits and published a major catalogue of the same name.

It was while she conducted her research in public and private collections in Canada and abroad that I first came into closer contact with her, as she searched through examples in the holdings of the Public Archives of Canada. Mary drew me into her circle of contacts including renowned art historians J. Russell Harper, Stephen Otto, and Charles Hill, collector and curator Peter Winkworth, and dealer John Russell. Mary and I became friends and colleagues. She welcomed me and my wife Sheila into her home during visits to Toronto on several occasions, where we learned how much she was appreciated by her many friends both inside and outside the world of Canadian art.

Mary would continue to break new ground in her research into Canadian art history throughout the next two decades. In 1989, together with National Gallery curator Rosemarie Tovell, she curated the exhibition An Engraver’s Pilgrimage: James Smillie in Quebec, 1821–1830, accompanied by a superb catalogue. In 1991, she was one of the co-curators of the National Gallery of Canada exhibition and catalogue Berczy, which circulated across Canada in 1991–92. And in 2000, I was privileged to be a co-curator with her and my colleague Rosemarie of the exhibition The Stone Age: Canadian Lithography from Its Beginnings, held at the National Gallery of Canada before traveling to the ROM.

As a writer, Mary was known for presenting her ideas with concision and clarity, both in her published work and her unpublished notes. Arlene Gehmacher, her successor as Curator of Canadian Paintings, Prints & Drawings at the ROM, has noted that “her curatorial files are a gold mine of information and insights.” Gilbert Gignac, retired from Library and Archives Canada, has observed that “she explored and researched with acute instinct and exactitude, resulting in a vast array of intelligent and inspiring public exhibitions and seminal publications.”

Beyond the major exhibitions for which she was responsible, Mary carried on the day-to-day work of managing the acquisition, cataloguing, and display of Canadian works of art at the ROM, first in the Sigmund Samuel Building on Queen’s Park Crescent in downtown Toronto and after 1985 in the main building of the ROM. Over the years, she worked with numerous colleagues, including Donald Webster, Helen Ignatieff, Barbara Chisholm, Ken Lister, Janet Holmes, Honor De Pencier, Carol Baum, Arlene Gehmacher, and many others. Mary also fielded thousands of inquiries about Canadian art from colleagues and from the general public over the course of her long career and worked with scholars and researchers from across Canada and the United States on a variety of other projects.

Mary was known to many private print collectors across North America, through her association with the North American Print Conference and the American Historical Print Collectors Society for more than two decades, and with the Print Council of America, with which she was associated from the 1980s onward. Through these connections, she developed firm friendships with a wide range of renowned scholars of early printmaking, including Sinclair Hitchings of the Boston Public Library, Wendy Shadwell of the New York Historical Society, Toby Hall of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Helena Wright of the National Museum of American History, Georgia Barnhill of the American Antiquarian Society, and W. Martha Cooke and Gilbert Gignac of Library and Archives Canada. I was proud to work with her on the acquisition of the extraordinary collection of Canadian prints and drawings assembled by the late Peter Winkworth, acquired by Library and Archives Canada in 2002. After her retirement from the ROM in 1995, Mary continued her work as Curator Emeritus on a proposed third volume of Canadian watercolors and drawings in the ROM, encompassing works acquired after 1974, which is almost ready for publication under the supervision of Arlene Gehmacher.

In addition to her professional career, Mary had a rather extraordinary social life. After her divorce, she embraced a wide and loyal coterie of friends. Her house was known to be a salon where artists and academics of all generations mingled and shared inspiration. In recognition of her contribution to Canadian life, the government of Canada awarded her the Order of Canada in 1998, the citation noting that:

Her diligent scholarship and curatorial work during a long career at the Royal Ontario Museum have resulted in a large and important collection accessible to all. By sharing her knowledge with colleagues, students, and the public, she has stimulated an interest in our cultural heritage and social past and created a foundation for future scholars to build upon.

As both colleagues and friends remember, her intellectual rigor was accompanied by warmth, generosity of spirit, and a beautifully dry wit. Mary passed away in Toronto on May 31, 2021. Predeceased by her son Marc and her sister Eilish McKendy, she leaves behind her son Jim, brothers James and Edward Macaulay, and beloved grandchildren Eve and Arlo, as well as many cherished nieces and nephews and their children.