Alfred W. Holdstock

Born in 1820 in Bath, England (or possibly in 1819 in Sussex), Holdstock studied at Oxford University. In 1850 he emigrated to Montreal where he taught drawing privately and also at the National School on Bonsecours Street near Champ de Mars. He is listed in the Montreal directories from 1855 to 1875 at various addresses as a landscape painter and teacher of drawings. In the 1869-70 directory he is listed as ''Alfred William Holdstock artist''.

Holdstock worked in oil, pastel and water-colour. His landscape subjects were taken largely in the Ottawa Valley, Laurentians and Thousand Islands. His works are in the collections of the PAC and the NGC, Ottawa; ROM, Toronto; AGO, Toronto; John Ross Robertston Collection, Metropolitan Toronto Central Library and Government Of Ontario Collection (Dept. of Public Works), Leglislative Buildings, Toronto; Château de Ramezay and McGill University, Montreal; and Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba.

Copied from W. Martha E. Cooke, Coverdale Collection of Canadiana. Paintings, Water-colours and drawings, (Public Archives of Canada, 1983), p. 117