This scene in Westmount Park is one of the 7,000 postcards BAnQ recently acquired. Published by the Montreal Import Co. between 1903 and 1914. Source: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, CP 5464.
The Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) has received an impressive collection of 7,000 postcards depicting scenes of Montreal from the late 19th century to the 1960s, all collected by Pierre Monette.
When announcing the acquisition, interim president and CEO Geneviève Pichet said the postcards show the transformation of the city through different periods, along with Montrealers’ clothing and activities.
Although postcards are best known for promoting tourist attractions and architecture, the Monette collection is full of scenes of everyday life in Montreal. Images show firefighters extinguishing a fire, Mile-End garage owners proudly posing at their workplace, skiers on Mount Royal, young people relaxing at the pool, visitors in Dominion Park, Verdun campgrounds, soldiers on a train, and Dorval sailors sailing on the St. Lawrence River.
More than 200 postcards in the collection show the work of Harry Sutcliffe (1878-1942), a Canadian photographer of British origin who created some of the finest postcards of Montreal in the 1920s and 1930s.
The postcards in the Monette collection are now being processed and digitized and will gradually be made available online. To provide a glimpse of what the collection contains, BAnQ has posted a few dozen postcards on Flickr.
With this acquisition, BAnQ now owns about 55,000 postcards that show scenes across the province of Quebec, and more than 28,000 are available to view online.
The announcement about this acquisition was made after the news about budget and job cuts and a slowdown in the digitization program.
