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Mayor Bob Benedetti unveiled The Muse Tuesday. (JOHN KENNEY/The Gazette)

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Statue given new life at Beaconsfield Library

Sculpture recovered from former Drummond family residence restored

The Gazette
Wednesday, June 3, 2009

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Mayor Bob Benedetti unveiled The Muse Tuesday. (JOHN KENNEY/The Gazette)

The Muse of the Rose Garden, a limestone sculpture that once graced the gardens at Sir George A. Drummond’s Beaconsfield mansion, has found a new life at the Beaconsfield Library.

Restored by the Centre de conservation de Québec, Beaconsfield Mayor Bob Benedetti, along with members of the Drummond family – great-granddaughter Dorothea McNiven and great-great-granddaughter, Erica Hyde, both of Pointe Claire – unveiled the statue Tuesday.

“We are proud to have recovered this statue of historical and artistic value found in our territory,” he said.

The Muse could have just as easily been destroyed instead of undergoing a year-long restoration, Benedetti said.

The statue, a draped female figure that stands more than nine feet tall, had been in a greenspace at Evergreen Crescent for years.

“It had been vandalized and neighbours called to complain about the condition of the statue,” said Benedetti.

The Muse had also darkened with age and was covered with bird excrement.

“When city workers asked me what to do with the statue, I said we should get it appraised just in case,” Benedetti said. “And when the experts saw it, their eyes almost popped out of their heads; there’s nothing like it in Quebec.”

According to specialists at the Centre de conservation de Québec, the Muse was sculpted in very soft, porous limestone, indicating that it comes from Europe, and is comparable to sculptures dating from the 17th century found in France.

“Up till now, we can’t say for sure,” Benedetti said. “We are currently trying to track down its provenance.”

History of the statue:

The history of the statue’s origins in Beaconsfield dates back to 1902, when Drummond, a co-director of Redpath Sugar and president of the Bank of Montreal as well as a board member of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, built a mansion called Huntlywood in Beaconsfield, north of the railroad and west of St. Charles Blvd.

The residence consisted of 32 rooms, gardens with pools, stables, coach houses and more.
At the bottom of the estate, a rose garden was planted, guarded at either end by two statues installed on their bases.

In 1912, Huntlywood was sold to Sir Montagu Allan, of the Allan Steamship Line, and renamed Allancroft.

Due to personal tragedies resulting from Word War I – Allen lost two daughters in May 1915 with the sinking of the RMS Lusitania when it was struck by a German U-20 submarine. Two years later, a son was killed in action. The Allen family never lived in the mansion which lay abandoned until a fire levelled it in 1938.

The area was sold to developers following WW II and many of the gardens, pools and statues disappeared.

Only one of the two sculptures in the rose garden – The Muse of the Rose garden – survived the test of time.

Restoration of the Muse cost $20,000, said Benedetti, half of which was spent on the cost of shipping the statue to Quebec City.