Tandem Club on the St Charles River

The attribution from comparison with the nearly identical watercolour of closely similar size, signed ‘A. Brown’, in the Coverdale Collection (Cooke, no.64, ‘Tandem Sleigh Club on the St Charles River, Quebec City, Lower Canada, c.1830’). For another similar work, see John Crawford Young’s watercolour of the same subject in the National Gallery of Canada (29214.23).

‘… British soldiers thought, during the long winter months spent in Canada, there was nothing better than racing around town and gliding swiftly across frozen waterways in tandem sleighs. Tandem clubs were formed wherever the British were garrisoned in the nineteenth century – Quebec, Montreal, Halifax, and Toronto – becoming such a defining feature of winter in colonial Canada that the associated equipment merited inclusion in the Canadian exhibit at the Great Exhibition held at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851.’ (K. Plummer, ‘Sleighing Soldiers: The Toronto Tandem Club’, The Fife and Drum, The Newsletter of The Friends of Fort York and Garrison Common, v.16 No.5 Dec. 2012, pp.1-2)

The Quebec Tandem Club members gathered once a week at Place d’Armes to ride through the city and out to Sainte-Foy, Charlesbourg or Montmorency.