The story
A small art centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario holds something unusual for a Canadian campus: paintings by Rembrandt. Most of them came from one man, Alfred Bader, a chemist who had reached Canada as a wartime refugee from Vienna and studied here in the 1940s before building a fortune in industrial chemicals.
Bader spent that fortune on Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, and over decades he and his wife Isabel gave the centre one painting after another. Attributions to Rembrandt are argued over by scholars, and one head study here was doubted for years before opinion swung back toward the master, which is part of what makes the collection a teaching tool as much as a display.
The gallery is named for Agnes Etherington, a Kingston woman who left her house to the university in 1954 to become an art centre. It opened in 1957, and Isabel Bader's bequest in 2022 added dozens more European paintings to what began as a room for teaching students.
