Van Horne Mansion
The Van Horne Mansion () was a classic greystone house on Sherbrooke Street at the corner of Stanley Street in Montreal's Golden Square Mile. It was built in 1869 for John Hamilton, President of the Merchant's Bank of Montreal, Quebec. In 1889, Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, President of the Canadian Pacific Railway, purchased the property and it remained in his family until it was controversially demolished in 1973. Despite the public outcry over its proposed destruction, Mayor Jean Drapeau declared that it could not be preserved for cultural reasons as it was not part of Quebec's culture, its history being Anglo Canadian, not French Canadian. With Drapeau's support, it was bulldozed in the middle of the night by developer David Azrieli, who replaced it with a concrete tower block. The Sofitel Hotel today stands at the spot once occupied by the Van Horne mansion. History Van Horne hired Bruce Price's architectural firm, who had done much of the work for the Canadian Pacific Railway, to enlarge the old Hamilton's Italianate house to fifty-two rooms. Hamilton had hired architect John William Hopkins (also with Daniel Berkley Wily) and was completed in 1869. It was Edward Colonna (died 1948), an architect who had previously worked for Louis Comfort Tiffany before being hired by Price, who carried out the alterations to the Van Horne house. Colonna redid the entire ground floor and possibly much of the first floor, creating a spacious area with well-proportioned rooms and plenty of wall-space for Van Horne's art collection. The interior of Van Horne's house, from its fireplaces, ceilings and gold leaf walls, was the first example of art nouveau in Canada. Van Horne claimed to like homes "big and bulky like myself", but he had one of the best private art and pottery collections in North America and wanted a house he could share with it. The building was damaged by a fire on Monday, April 3, 1933, which led to the loss of part of Van Horne's private art collection. Van Horne Art Collection As a child, Van Horne collected fossils. He was also an excellent violinist and artist in his own right. When he was older, Van Horne was not just a serious collector, he had a passion for art: "A picture that you feel you do not really want is always an incubus and a source of dissatisfaction". He started collecting on his business trips around the world in the 1880s. By 1892, he had confidence enough in his knowledge to catalogue his most prized possessions, now found in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He not only built up the most important collection in Canada, but added to it a comprehensive library on art history. He was meticulous in not just his choice of paintings, but also in his studies into the lives of the artists too. His collection featured the works of Velázquez, Hals, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable and Turner. He also collected many modern works, and in his catalogue