page_title: Emeric Essex Vidal
section_title: Canada
hierarchical_section_title: Emeric Essex Vidal / Work / Canada
caption_attribution_description: English: Sackets Harbor, NY was the American dockyard wherein naval vessels were constructed during the War of 1812 for service on the Great Lakes. This view was sketched by the English watercolourist E.E. Vidal probably for military intelligence purposes while the details of the peace were still being negotiated.
context_page_description: Emeric Essex Vidal was an English watercolourist and naval officer. His opportunities for travel, his curiosity about local customs and human types, and his eye for the picturesque, led him to make paintings which are now historical resources. A landscape painter and a costumbrista, he was the first visual artist to leave records of the ordinary inhabitants of the newly emergent Argentina and Uruguay, including the first depictions of gauchos. He also left records of Canada, Brazil, the West Indies and St Helena, where he sketched the newly deceased Napoleon.
  No full-length biography of Vidal yet exists; only brief accounts, written from the viewpoints of the lands he visited. Although a number of his watercolours have been published as hand-coloured aquatints, or by modern printing methods, or sold at auction, it is plausible that most have been lost or await rediscovery in private collections.
context_section_description: In 1815, although on half pay, he visited the Canadian Great Lakes, where his younger brother Alexander Thomas Emeric was employed on surveying service, and acted for a time as Secretary to flag officer Commodore Owen.  He made or copied a number of military maps and sketches.  Whilst in the country he made various watercolour drawings, including Niagara Falls, which hangs in the National Gallery of Canada.
  In the (then) recent naval war between the United States and Great Britain on Lake Ontario both sides had "constructed immense fleets in areas which were only sparsely settled", including large sea-going ships (the "Battle of the Carpenters").  They were built at the rival yards of Sackets Harbor and Kingston Royal Naval Dockyard.
  Vidal's watercolour Sackett's Harbour, Lake Ontario taken 20th September 1815 is a panoramic view of the American facility, possibly sketched surreptitiously because of the still tense situation.  It contains military intelligence now of considerable historical value.
  His Commodore's House in the Naval Yard, Kingston, which is in the Royal Military College of Canada, documents the British/Canadian facility, with a ship actually under construction (see the oxen) — it could not be guaranteed that the peace treaty would hold.  Its depiction of the Commodore's house has been studied by Canadian architectural historians for the light it throws on the origins of the Ontario Cottage type.
  Vidal is sometimes listed as a Canadian artist.  The Massey Library of the Royal Military College holds further images by Vidal.
caption: Sackets Harbor (zoom in)
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