Canadian royal symbols
Canadian royal symbols are the visual and auditory identifiers of the Canadian monarchy, including the viceroys, in the country's federal and provincial jurisdictions. These may specifically distinguish organizations that derive their authority from the Crown, establishments with royal associations, or merely be ways of expressing loyal or patriotic sentiment.
Most royal symbols in Canada are based on inherited predecessors from France, England, and Scotland, the evidence of which is still visible today, though, over time, adaptations have been made to include uniquely Canadian elements. Some representations were discarded during and after the 1970s, within an evolving Canadian identity, while others were created over the same time and continue to be up to the present. Today, symbols of the monarchy can be seen in military badges, provincial and national coats of arms, royal prefixes, monuments, and eponymous names of geographical locations and structures.
Purpose
The use of royal symbols developed from the first royal emblems and images of French, English, Scottish, and, later, British monarchs that were brought by colonists to New France and British North America to represent the authority of the sovereign back in Europe. The first verifiable use of a royal symbol in Canada was when Jacques Cartier raised the Royal Arms of France on the Gaspé Peninsula in 1534. Since then, some icons were created for use uniquely in the Canadas—mostly coats of arms. But, only after the First World War did growing Canadian nationalism lead to changes in the appearance and meaning to Canadians of royal symbols. Since Canada gained full legislative independence from the United Kingdom in 1931, images of the reigning monarch have been employed to signify either Canada's membership in the Commonwealth of Nations, the Crown's authority, loyalty to Canada, or Canada's full statehood.Sean Palmer asserted in the 2018 book, The Canadian Kingdom: 150 Years of Constitutional Monarchy, that Canada and New Zealand are the two Commonwealth realms that have given the greatest attention to "the nationalization" of the visual symbols of their respective monarchies, particularly, in Canada, since the creation of the Canadian Heraldic Authority in 1988.
Images
The main symbol of the monarchy is the sovereign him or herself, being described as "the personal expression of the Crown in Canada" and the personification of the Canadian state. Thus, the image of the sovereign acts as an indication of that individual's authority and therefore appears on objects created by order of the Crown-in-Council, such as coins, postage stamps, and the Great Seal of Canada. The images of English monarchs were first stuck onto coins 1,000 years ago. Through the 1800s, effigies and pictures of the monarch—Queen Victoria, especially—came to be symbolic of the wider British Empire, to which Canada belonged. As with other royal symbols, though, the general domestic meaning of the sovereign's portrait altered through the 20th century. The royal cypher is also regarded as a personal logo of the monarch, generally consisting of at least his or her initials. In Canada, the cypher has come to be indicative of the country's full sovereignty.Many of the depictions of the sovereign and other members of the royal family, as well as some of their clothing, are part of the Crown Collection, a carried compilation of paintings, prints, sculptures, objets d'art, and furniture.
Coinage, banknotes, and postage
Coins were one of the first objects to bear the image of the reigning sovereign in what is today Canada. After 1640, French colonists employed the Louis d'or until the transfer of New France to the British in 1763. After, British sovereigns and coppers were used, sometimes long after the end of the reign of the monarch appearing on the coin. As a result of decimalisation, the Province of Canada replaced the Canadian pound with the dollar in 1858, minting new coins whose obverse side featured an effigy of Queen Victoria; a trend that continued with the first coins issued in Canada after confederation. Since its establishment in 1908, coins minted by the Royal Canadian Mint featured an effigy of the reigning monarch.Canadian coins featured effigies of the monarch that were consistent with the other Commonwealth realms until 1990. In that year, the Royal Canadian Mint opted to use an effigy of Elizabeth II designed by Dora de Pédery-Hunt, making her the first Canadian to sculpt an effigy of the Queen on coinage. Pédery-Hunt's rendition was used until 2003 when a design by Susanna Blunt took its place. After the death of Elizabeth II, Blunt's effigy remained in use until 2023, when it was replaced by Steven Rosati's rendition of Charles III.
Images of the reigning monarch and his or her family have also traditionally been printed on Canadian postage stamps since 1851, when Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, were shown on 12- and 6-pence stamps, respectively, for mail in the Province of Canada. Stamps previously issued in other British North American colonies showed images of crowns and, into the late 1800s, bore some variation of the Queen's cypher. Starting in 1939, when she was still Princess Elizabeth of York, Queen Elizabeth II was depicted in 59 successive stamp designs in Canada, continuing on to the Queen Elizabeth II definitive stamps released in the 2000s.
Artworks
The monarchs of Canada have been portrayed by Canadian and European artists in paint, sculpture, and photography. Formal likenesses of the monarch are commissioned by relevant official bodies, such as crowns-in-council or parliaments, and are often found inside or outside government buildings, military installations, many schools, and Canada's high commissions and embassies abroad, as well as in parks and other public places. A full collection of official portraits of sovereigns of Canada and its predecessor territories going back to King Francis I was amassed by Senator Serge Joyal and are on display in the Senate foyer and Salon de la Francophonie in the parliament buildings' Centre Block.One of these is the portrait of Queen Victoria painted by John Partridge, which was created in the United Kingdom and shipped to Canada in the early 1840s. It was rescued from four fires, including the burning of the parliament of the Province of Canada in 1849 and the great fire that destroyed the Centre Block in 1916. During the latter event, parliamentary staff, desperately trying to save as much artwork as they could, found the portrait of Victoria was too large to fit through the door. They, thus, quickly cut it out of its frame and rolled it up. As a consequence, a cut through the crown can be seen today in the painting, which hangs in the Senate foyer.
An official painted portrait of Queen Elizabeth II was created in 1976, and another by Scarborough, Ontario, artist Phil Richards was completed in 2012 mark the monarch's Diamond Jubilee. The latter image depicts Elizabeth wearing her insignia as Sovereign of the Order of Canada and Order of Military Merit and standing in Rideau Hall beside a desk upon which is a copy of the Constitution Act, 1867, and a vase embossed with the Canadian Diamond Jubilee emblem; behind the Queen is the Canadian national flag and George Hayter's 1837 state portrait of Victoria. The creation of this portrait is the subject of a National Film Board of Canada documentary directed by Hubert Davis, which was released in fall 2012 as part of the NFB's Queen's Diamond Jubilee Collector's Edition. The painting was on 25 June installed in the ballroom at Rideau Hall.
File:The statue of Queen Elizabeth II in Regina, Saskatchewan.jpg|thumb|left|The statue of Elizabeth II outside the Saskatchewan Legislative Building
Elizabeth II was also the subject of Canadian painters, including Jean Paul Lemieux, whose 1979 work affectionate memory images combines "the familiar and the constitutional" by portraying the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in a meadow in front of the Canadian parliament buildings.
More formal and enduring are the sculptures of some of Canada's monarchs, such as Louis-Philippe Hébert's bronze statue of Queen Victoria that was in 1901 unveiled on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Jack Harmon of British Columbia created in 1992 the equestrian statue of Queen Elizabeth II that also stands on Parliament Hill, and sculptor Susan Velder fashioned in June 2003 another such statue for the grounds of the Saskatchewan Legislative Building.
Queen Elizabeth II posed for a number of Canada's prominent photographers, the first being Yousuf Karsh, who made a formal portrait of Elizabeth when she was a 17-year-old princess and, later, took a series of official pictures of the princess, in formal and informal poses, just months before she acceded to the throne. Karsh was commissioned on two subsequent occasions to create series of pictures of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, once prior to Elizabeth's 1967 tour of Canada for the centenary of Canada's confederation, when he photographed the royal couple at Buckingham Palace, and again in 1984, creating a set of portraits that included a shot of the Queen with her corgi, Shadow. Prior to her second tour of Canada as queen in 1959, Elizabeth requested that a Canadian photographer take her pre-tour pictures and Donald McKeague of Toronto was selected. Then, in 1973, Onnig Cavoukian, also from Toronto, made a photographic portrait that was dubbed "The Citizen Queen" because of the informal way in which Elizabeth was depicted. Rideau Hall photographer John Evans captured the sovereign on film in 1977, during her Silver Jubilee stay in Ottawa; Evans portrayed the Queen following her return from opening parliament. More recently, photographic portraits of Queen Elizabeth II were made in 2002, as part of her Golden Jubilee celebrations, and in 2005, when she marked the centenaries of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
The Queen's Beasts were created by James Woodford for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 and based on the King's Beasts, originally made for Hampton Court Palace, near London, on the order of King Henry VIII. Though commissioned by the British Ministry of Works, the Queen's Beasts are now in the collection of the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa, having been given to the Canadian Crown-in-Council in 1958.