Landscape

Jenny's grandparents had an oil painting above their sofa in their house in Telegraph Cove, BC.  

When Jenny's aunt died in January 2022, her cousin passed on a number of family things. I suppose having written some historic non-fiction that included the lives of my grandmother and great-grandmother, and being a keen amateur genealogist, she is generally considered the family historian. 

One of the items he gave her was the painting that had been in the Wastell's Telegraph Cove house, along with a photograph of a young woman standing in front of her easel with this painting on it, half finished.

It was at that stage that she found out her grandmother's mother was that young woman, and this painting had been painted where she lived in Newfoundland, before she emigrated to BC in the late 1880s!

One of the fun projects of this trip has been trying to find out if this landscape is of a real place, and if so where. 

Topsail, where Emma Winsor Butler Gibbson McCoskrie lived before coming to BC? Decidedly no. 

Topsail beach

Port de Grave, where she was born? Possibly, but none of the people we met there recognized the fairly distinctive headland in the painting's background and nor did we.

Port de Grave penninsula

Perhaps Bell Island where her father had received a government lease to prospect for and harvest guano in the 1870s. I am not sure as we did not get to Bell Island.

Or perhaps it is just a typical Newfoundland coastal scene from her imagination. She has certainly captured the spirit, as we saw water and rocks like these everywhere.