In the mid-1980s, I was one of the authors preparing a book called The Illustrated History of Canada. In time it became a best-seller, and it remains a standard and strong-selling history of Canada. But a year before publication, it was in crisis. It was going to be an illustrated history... but neither the publishers nor most of the authors really knew much about illustrating Canadian history or illustrating a book. It seemed I knew enough to be worried, but not enough to convince anyone we had a problem. It was just some pictures.
Way late, someone recruited Robert Stacey to help with the pictures. I remember meeting him at Beaujolais, the then-trendy Queen Street restaurant that for a time served as lunchroom for those of us on that project. Related to Charles Stacey the historian, I asked? No, but the grandson of Charles Jefferys, the historical artist.
Bob Stacey saved our ass on The Illustrated History, is all he did. Here was someone who knew every image of the Canadian past, knew what it signified and how to use it, and knew where to secure prints and rights at blinding speed. Suddenly the Illustrated History had illustrations, and that many of them were superb and surprising was all to Bob Stacey's credit.
Not that he got much of it. He got paid a pittance and no royalty share, he told me later, and he devoted ten times as much time to the project as he should have. Somehow his career was often like that. He worked on art history projects, book publications, documentary films, gallery shows, and academic study projects from one end of Canada to the other. But it barely jelled into a career.
He was always simultaneously a freelance art curator and the most authoritative student of Canadian art that anyone knew. And in a position like that, no one really appreciates an independent mind. Everybody just wants some images found, just wants some authentication, just wants it done quick and cheap.
And in every project he took on, Bob Stacey would discover a whole lost neglected history of Canada and Canadian art that needed his attention, whereupon which he would lavish upon it time and attention out of all proportion to his clients' wishes or his own financial well-being. Instead of a memo, he would deliver a monograph no one had expected to publish.
Over twenty years, I used to get together with Bob Stacey from time to time, to be amazed at his erudition and bemused at the precarious position he occupied. In a series of offices around Toronto, one on Britain Street, one later on Wellington, he maintained the most extraordinary archives: seemingly every art catalogue and illustrated book ever published, and a vast collection of references works, offprints, posters, along with a great archives and collection of Charles Jeffreys material. It was always a mystery who was going to pay the rent, who was going to support the fifteen projects he had in the air, who would do the cataloguing, who was ever going to appreciate the riches available here.
But we would go for a beer, and he would be entertaining and funny and mordant. Knowledge and passion about Canadian art history would flow from him. I would go away inspired everytime, wondering if sometime Robert Stacey would have his breakthrough to recognition and applause. I profiled him for The Beaver once, trying to suggest my admiration and amazement.
His health failed a couple of years ago. Now the death notice.
Late update: Dreams do come true. The Globe called; they are preparing an obituary and saw this post. I'm kind of moved.
