Today it is owned by the House of Commons in Ottawa, Ontario.

This print dates from the 1930s and was cased in this frame at that time.

A stunning likeness of Sir John A, that captures his inner soul like no other portrait ever done of him, it is without doubt, the finest painting ever made of Canada's first Prime Minister.

He was a Conservative Prime Minister at the height of Britain's imperial expansionist wars, but did not believe Canadian troops should be sent overseas to help Imperial Britain subdue unruly Fuzzy Wuzzies, even though they were fanatic Muslims, were dirt poor, lived by archaic rules of civilization, and inhabited an impoverished country half way around the world.

A far cry from the Conservative Prime Minister of 130 years later who sent thousands of Canadian shooting soldiers to help put down the unruly and fanatic Muslim Afghans who are resisting the invading imperialist Americans trying to establish a military occupation of their impoverished country merely to protect oil pipelines they want to build across the area.

John A did send a contingent of unarmed French-Canadian voyageur canoeists to help ferry British troops up the Nile in their campaign against the Mahdi and his Muslim tribesmen - the Bin Laden and Al Qaeda of the 1880s.

But John A did send the Canadian militia to put down the disturbances in the west known as the Riel Rebellions 1869 and 1885.

So John A clearly believed Canadian armed force should be used when Canada was threatened.

He did not agree that Canada was threatened by rebellious non-white, non-Christian, pajama-clad Muslim tribesmen in destitute overseas countries, who were obviously only resisting a foreign invading army seeking to expand territorial power for the benefit of its businessmen who had discovered valuable resources that they wanted to grab from the locals...

Now where have we heard that before...

Great Canadian Artist Ernest Fosbery (1874-1960) would be quite angry if he knew the portrait he had created for the people of Canada was being purposely desecrated in an online museum, so that it could be resold to the school children and teachers of Canada by shameless civil servants.

Great Canadian Disgrace - Desecrating Canada's National Heritage Treasures

Hard as it may be to believe it is impossible for Canadians to get access to a copy of Fosbery's portrait of Sir John A from its owner, Canada's House of Commons and its online museum.

Rather, they can get one, but only ones that have been deliberately defaced by the civil servants who are hired to look after Canada's heritage treasures: paintings, sculptures, artifacts.

Canadians taxpayers, of course, purchased these heritage treasures long ago with their hard earned tax dollars.

They - the Newfoundland fisherman, the Quebec school teacher, the Ontario farmer, the Saskatchewan rancher, the Alberta oil driller, the British Columbia lumber worker - own them; they paid for them long ago. They pay for their upkeep every year. They also pay, extremely handsomely, the civil servants to look after them, and also pay for their pensions and expense accounts.

But they and their children get only the finger from the House of Commons. They are barred from getting to see or use them without an interfering desecration.

They are barred from getting a clean copy to use in their homes. School teachers are barred from using them to teach in the classrooms. Students are barred from being able to use them in educational projects.

Unless they pay for them all over again...

Civil servants have deliberately desecrated them - doubly in this case, with defacing letters on the bottom and a bigger defacement right across the middle where it does the most damage.

This has been deliberately done by civil servants to force any Canadian teacher and school child who would like to use good quality images of these Canadian heritage images, for their educational projects, to pay for them again, to help pay for civil servant wages, pensions, and expense accounts.

It is a national catastrophe; it is a national disgrace of the highest order.

Greed and selfishness run amok... To have a control system in place to allow Canada's national heritage treasures to be held to ransom from their rightful owners by the custodial staff...

How many times do Canadians have to pay civil servants for the right to gain access to their national heritage treasures?

Right how the House of Commons publishes the defaced pictures of notable Canadian political leaders of the past on its educational museum web site. Here its defaced image of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

But the HOC museum is craftily helpful.

To get copies of undefaced pictures, it offers school children two "Contact Us" portals where they can go to pay civil servants lots of money for pictures their parents have already paid for, over, and over again...

Thanks to Access to Information legislation we have been able to get a look at the prototype defacement logo right that civil servants initially proposed to use on the Prime Minister portraits before putting them on the internet.

One wag suggested the House of Commons logo, HOC-CDC, stood for "Completely Desecrated by Cretins," which is unkind. It is actually a government stamp of approval and stands for House of Commons-Certified Defacement Completed.

Many civil servants feared if they did not deface the face itself, unscrupulous Canadian school children would just crop off the logo and use only the face - without paying the civil servants for the rights to use it in their school projects.

But Prime Minister Harper's Heritage Minister refused permission and insisted the House of Commons logo be reduced to one line of desecration, and be made less obtrusive in size and tone, and also be moved away from the face.

"How, in your right mind, can you possibly propose defacing the face of a Prime Minister of Canada?" was the angry retort, when the Minister saw the proposed defacement. "Unless," he quickly added, "it is the face of Brian Mulroney?"

Civil servants were furious; they couldn't understand that. They knew how diabolical Canadian school children were, in their command of Photoshop and computers, to make use of parts of the picture that had not been defaced adequately.

Without paying...

Why they're almost as devious as former Conservative Prime Minister Mulroney below.

(Mr. Mulroney, was the former Conservative Prime Minister who famously took bags of cash, multiple times, quite secretly, from an arms dealer, without paying either - taxes in his case, until years later when his private stash of cash was about to be outed by a court proceeding. He has since been shunned by the current Conservative establishment in Ottawa, reflective of his new painting it recently commissioned.)

Canada commissions portraits of its Prime Ministers to hang in the corridors of Parliament, in order to enshrine their legacy for eternity in the mind set of the Nation. Mr. Mulroney's portrait has won kudos from all parts of Canada as being a most unusually excellent portrait.

Civil servants took the Minister's aside as an approval, with a vengeance, to deface the internet portrait of the recently completed painting of Mr. Mulroney.

Civil servants knew school children would be just as tricky as the former Prime Minister, and try to use internet pictures of their politicians in spite of the worst that civil servants could do to try to prevent them.

Below the winning design for desecration as now (2009) published on all the portraits on the House of Commons web museum.

Below right Prime Minister Sir Charles Tupper, and the only national politician ever assassinated in Canada, Thomas D'Arcy McGee.

Educators, teachers and school children, across Canada, still bemoan this great and uncalled-for desecration of Canada's heritage treasures.

And they resent having to pay for removing the defacement on pictures Canadian taxpayers already own and have paid for.

Go to Prime Minister Tupper

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure	A fabulous historic antique photogravure of Sir John A Macdonald, created in 1891 by William Bengough (1863 - 1932) a celebrated artist who painted many American and Canadian scenes at the end of the 19th century. Another famous picture Bengough created was of a mounted Louis Riel during the period he was in a confrontation with the Government of Canada during the Métis Resistance of 1885. The portrait of John A that Bengough created was used in various versions, one as an ad, showing John A like a huckster, holding a box of soap to sell, and another holding a book to give him an intellectual air.
Photogravure, John A Macdonald - William Bengough, 1891
Orig. photogravure - Image Size - 37 x 52 cm Found - Kingston, ON
This print is antique. It has its original wavy glass, and is in mint condition, in a frame that is at least 100 years old. Up close, under a loupe, all three John A black and white pictures we show here are called "original prints" as they were each, created by a worker who individually inked the plate, rubbed the ink into the crevices on the plate with the palm of his hand, and then applied the paper, running it through a press to transfer the inked image. Then he would re-ink the plate and do it again. There are no dots, like in later photomechanically printed "reproductions" to be seen here.

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure Cabinet Card, Sir John A Macdonald, c 1888 Orig. photo - Size - 4.25 x 6.5" Found - Grimsby, ON Photo by Desmarais, Montreal, Canada

Above the backs of the two photogravures show what framed antique prints should look like.

The thin cedar shakes are still there, showing the round circular saw marks, another sign of 19th century workmanship. The knots have dried out and fallen off long ago - a very good indicator of age.

Usually where the cedar shakes join, a staining streak transmits to the print in front of it. Lots of antique prints are defaced with vertical or horizontal streaks as a result. Happily this did not happen with either of these photogravures. This is because the photogravures are on thick, quality paper which has absorbed the staining from the back without transmitting it to the front.

The dust cover paper backing - which is used by high end art establishments to close off quality prints from dust getting in - has rotted off from both photogravures. Only the remnants are left on the back on one, and along the edges in the other. Another indicator of quality antique art.

The suspension wire is rusted and very degraded in both; the screws rusted and very wiggly.

The glass on both photogravures is very wavy, typical of that found on 19th century prints. So unlike one finds on so many framed antique prints, neither had its original glass broken and then replaced with later clearer glass. The glass dates from the 19th century.

It all means these photogravures of John A are antique, dating from the 1880s - not repros from the 1930s or 1950s.

Because it produced very high quality and richly textured art prints, photogravure was the printing technique used to make copies from high end art and photographs.

The image was etched into a flat copper plate, producing indentations and wells. The ink was pressed into the crevices, by hand, the excess being removed by the operator with cloths. He finally rubbed the inked surface with the palm of his hand, which further distributed the ink, and removed the excess. Then a high quality paper was placed on top of the copper plate and run through a press. A quality photogravure was carefully lifted off, having absorbed the ink pattern from the copper plate. The plate would then be inked again and prepared by hand as before to make another photogravure. The process was labour intensive, by the each...

And it shows; the photogravures are magnificent in detail.

The texture of the surface looks real as the swirls of ink make it look as if it's a charcoal original.

The photogravures can in no way be compared to modern prints run off by printing press like calendar art, while the operator watches TV.