The Physician's Eye
A handful of art history grad students and their professors were invited to a tour of The Physician’s Eye, a selection of prints and etchings from the private collection of Drs. Jonathan Meakins and Jacqueline McClaran currently on exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA).
The tour was led by Meakins himself, eager to present some of the high points of his collection to his fellow Concordia students and professors Johanne Sloan and Catherine MacKenzie.
In fall 2010, Meakins returned to school for a degree in art history after a career as a doctor and professor of surgery. He held that position at McGill and most recently at Oxford University until he retired in 2008, moving back to Montreal.
He and his wife have been collecting prints for three decades, reinforcing a love of art that had been instilled in him from childhood. “My mother used to take my two sisters and me to this museum on rainy days,” he recalled in the MMFA exhibition rooms where The Physician’s Eye will be displayed until August 21, 2011. He remembered being particularly impressed by Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War, a series of prints then on display in the museum.
During the April 6 private tour Meakins discussed how the collection grew from a general interest in art to a more specific set of interests. In notes to accompany the exhibition, Meakins writes, “When we started to collect we had no particular theme or focus. We simply acquired works that were of interest at the time, that generated excitement or that had direct or indirect relevance to our professional lives.” Some of those works had a medical theme; others were favourites like Albrecht Dürer’s The Large Horse, used in the exhibition’s poster.
The collection on display is impressive, with works by Édouard Manet, Rembrandt van Rijn and Pablo Picasso. Most prints are landscapes, but some, like Cornelis Dusart’s The Large Village Fair, depict aspects of daily life.
It was the personal anecdotes and the passion that Meakins conveyed during the tour that was most infectious. He described the excitement of trying to track down favourite prints or complete sets of works and how after each successful purchase he was “always going on to the next print.”
Although the landscapes and pieces reflecting a range of European periods in the current exhibition cover a lot of territory, Meakins is aware of what had to be excluded. “We didn’t bring any of the Japanese pieces and there are no Canadian prints,” he said. Meakins adds that the full collection is too vast to be on display at once. At home, many of the works are regularly rotated on display rails in a long hallway.
Related links:
• The Physician’s Eye: Five Centuries of European Prints from the Collection of Drs. Jonathan Meakins and Jacqueline McClaran
• Concordia's Department of Art History