(1878 or 1879-23 July 1916), artist. (Cyrus Cuneo, Cyrus C. Cuneo, C. C. Cuneo, known to family and friends as Ciro) Born in San Francisco. He studied art for four years in Paris, and was at this time one of the students of the great American artist, J.A.M. Whistler. After a return visit to the United States of half a year, Cuneo settled in England, his home for the remainder of his life. There, he quickly made a reputation (was soon “inundated with work,” his son said) as an illustrator for the periodical press and for books. He travelled in the U. S. and Canada, evidently more than once, on commission for the CPR and the London Illustrated News, doing illustrations. A contemporary thought “Few things more notable have been seen in the press than the series of double-pages which appeared in the Illustrated London News as a result of his trip through Canada on behalf of that paper and of the Canadian Pacific Railway…” (Bradshaw)
Cuneo, we may confidently guess, never put foot in GC, but he painted one of the most striking of all the illustrations of GC. His oil painting “A Glengarry Settler” is almost two yards by three in size. Probably it was intended to be hung in one of the CPR hotels. The painting is reproduced in colour in John Murray Gibbon’s Scots in Canada: a History of the Settlement of the Dominion from the Earliest Days to the Present Time (1911), where it illustrates the chapter “Glengarry, Ontario.” It is reproduced also in black and white in the Ontario Archives Report for 1930 and in Fern Bayer’s The Ontario Collection (published for the Ontario Heritage Foundation by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1984). It may be guessed that the painting appeared also as an illustration in newspapers or magazines soon after it was made, or that the Glengarry scene of the painting first took the form of a magazine illustration, but no such press locations have been as yet found. The original painting was presented by Edward Beatty, president of the CPR, to the archivist of Ontario, Alexander Fraser, about the end of the 1920s. Today it is a part of the Ontario Government Art Collection. In recent years, a copy of the Cuneo painting was made in watercolour by C. J. Greenwood from the Gibbon book, and by 1997 had been installed as part of a historic series in the CPR headquarters in Calgary.
Cuneo’s painting shows a kilted, tam-wearing Highlander plowing a rugged hillside in a landscape which prominently features a small grove of pink-flowering trees. We know almost nothing about what the first settlers of GC wore, but we may be certain that few of them except those from the very small social elite owned “traditional” Highland costume of a kind that could reasonably be defined as kilts and that no one whatsoever among them would wear kilts while doing farm work such as plowing. So to that extent the painting is unhistorical. Yet there must be no other painting that so well summarizes and illustrates the Glengarry legend, its glories and its fictions, even if the depiction of the kilted plowman does owe something to our old friend, the stage Scotchman.
The flowering trees in the picture are presumably meant to be an orchard, perhaps an apple orchard, but symbolic in any case of the beginnings of agriculture. It would be trifling, perhaps, to make another objection here, namely that the trees seem too well developed to belong to the very earliest stages of claiming the land. Indeed, given that a GC pioneer was likely to be a pioneer for much of his working life, the problem has a ready and easy (if not wholly satisfying) answer. But in fact, presumably entirely by chance, through the inclusion of the flowering trees Cuneo captures one of the striking features of the Glengarry spring, namely the flowering of the wild plums (Canada Plum) along the edges of the fields as the farmers complete the plowing, sowing, and so forth of their “springswork.” The white and pinkish-white of the wild plums and the brown of the fields do form a contrast such as is represented in the painting. Cuneo’s blossoms are a little too pink for wild plums–but they are also too pink for apples. No documentary evidence has come to light about how Cuneo’s “Glengarry Settler” painting was commissioned and how it took form, and what sources he used for it. Much of his artwork for the CPR is said to have been destroyed when the CPR offices in Liverpool were bombed during World War II. Perhaps some of the secrets of the origins of this strange, ahistorical, and yet magnificent painting were lost then.
The black-and-white illustration in John Murray Gibbon’s Steel of Empire (NY 1935) of “Simon Fraser Shooting the Rapids of the Fraser River” is labelled as being from a painting by Cuneo. A painting in colour of the same title appears in the Scots in Canada volume, but is not identified there as by Cuneo, unless his signature has been masked in the reproduction. (This was Simon Fraser of the present dictionary)
Cuneo died in London at the early age of 37, from blood poisoning which set in after he was accidentally scratched by a woman’s fingernail at a studio party. His reputation, which it is hardly an exaggeration to describe as brilliant for a time, seems to have faded quickly after his death. He is said to have “described himself as ‘an Englishman by preference and adoption, an American by birth and citizenship, and an Italian of unmixed blood by parentage’.” (Bradshaw) He was married in 1903 to Nell Marion Tenison (1867-1953), of England, herself an artist. She had been a fellow student of his at the Carlo Rossi art academy in Paris. Their son Terence Tenison Cuneo (1 Nov. 1907-3 Jan. 1996) was well known as a painter of railway scenes, but more importantly he had a long and distinguished career as a portrait painter, whose subjects included the Queen (a number of times), Edward Heath, and Field Marshal Montgomery. Unlike his father, he has been alloted a biography in the recent Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Percy V. Bradshaw, The Art of the Illustrator: Cyrus Cuneo and His Work (n.d.): includes biog. detail, and, in one of the 2 versions of this book, a fine portrait of Cuneo * Terence Cuneo, The Mouse & His Master (1977): biog. detail on C. C. Cuneo; includes Terence’s autobiography * Grant M. Waters, Dictionary of British Artists Working 1900-1950 (1975) p. 82: entries for Cuneo, his wife and son Terence * P. H. Falk, ed., Who Was Who in American Art (1985) 142 * death, inquest, London Times 24 & 27 July 1916 * Gibbon, Archives Report and Bayer as cited * information kindly supplied by CPR Archives, National Library of Canada, Archives of Ontario * For Terence Cuneo, also People of Today (Debrett’s Peerage Limited, 1993) 463-464, & Who’s Who in Art, 27th edn. (1996) 118-119 * Gibbon: MDict 294; his London and CPR connections suggest his possible links with Cuneo