Lord Amherst
Category
Glass
Date
Unknown
Materials
Glass, Paint, Wood
Measurements
175 x 105 mm
Order this imageCollection
Quebec House, Kent
NT 529153
Summary
Painting on glass, Portrait of Lord Amherst (Field Marshall Sir Jeffrey Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst of Holmesdale (1717 - 1797) by unknown artist in a partridge wood frame.
Full description
Painting on glass, Portrait of Lord Amherst (Field Marshall Sir Jeffery Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst of Holmesdale (1717-1797) by unknown artist. Jeffery Amherst was Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in North America during the Seven Years’ War and became first British Governor General of the territories which would become Canada in 1760. Following their victory against France, the British began to expand their settlement east. In 1763 a confederation of First Nations peoples led by Odawa chief Pontiac fought back against this encroachment on their territory. The conflict became known as Pontiac’s War or Pontiac’s Rebellion. Amherst’s correspondence during this conflict shows that he wished to ‘extirpate’ the Indigenous peoples and sanctioned a plan to infect them with smallpox through contaminated blankets. [1] Modern historians have compared this plan to biological warfare [2] and genocide [3]. In recent years there have been campaigns to rename city streets and institutions named after Amherst. In 2019 Rue Amherst in Montreal was renamed Rue Ataketen, meaning ‘brothers and sisters’ in the Mohawk language. [4] [1] Knollenberg 1954: Bernhard Knollenberg ‘General Amherst and Germ Warfare’ The Mississippi Valley Historical Review Vol. 41, No. 3 (1954): 489-494 [2] Fenn 2000: Elizabeth A. Fenn ‘Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst’ The Journal of American History , Mar., 2000, Vol. 86, No. 4 (2000): 1552-1580 [3] Ostler 2015: Jeffrey Ostler ‘“To Extirpate the Indians”: An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1750s–1810’ The William and Mary Quarterly , Vol. 72, No. 4 (2015): 587-622 [4] Anhoury 2019: Mia Anhoury ‘Amherst St.’s new name revealed: Atateken’ Montreal Gazette (21 July 2019) available at: https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/amherst-st-s-new-name-revealed-atateken