Guy Vadeboncoeur, longtime Stewart Museum chief curator and director, has died

Montreal Gazette

27-07-2025

Guy Vadeboncoeur, the longtime chief curator and executive director of the Stewart Museum, has died. He was 76. The cause was cancer.
The Stewart Museum was founded in 1955 by tobacco heir David M. Stewart and Liliane M. Stewart: It began as a private collection that David Stewart expanded into a collection of more than 30,000 artefacts, archival documents and rare books related to the European presence in New France and North America. It includes scientific instruments, one of Canada's best collections of firearms, European porcelain, Gobelin tapestry from France and objects used in everyday life in the 17 th and 18 th centuries.
For years, the museum was on St-Helen's Island, in a former fortified arsenal built by the British in 1822 and used as a munitions depot. In 2013, it merged with the McCord Museum and, when the Stewart Museum closed permanently in 2021, its collection was absorbed by that of the McCord and the museum is now known as McCord Stewart Museum.
For more than than half-century until his retirement in early 2014, Vadeboncoeur was closely associated with the many projects and endeavours of the Stewarts.
He distinguished himself by integrating his knowledge of history with education and teaching, said Bruce Bolton, who served as longtime director of the museum before leaving to head the Macdonald-Stewart Foundation — an approach that earned him the recognition of peers in a the museum community. During his career, he twice served as president of the Société des Musées du Québec, from 1981 to 1982, and 2005 to 2007, and the Canadian Museums Association from 1983 to 1985, In 2004, he was elected Fellow of the association — a high honour in Canadian museum circles. He also participated in several juries for grants and scholarships in the museum field.
'We started working together in 1966 and stayed with the family. It was quite a collaboration. He was our human computer: He knew all the objects in the museum and when we acquired them,' Bolton said.
'His background in history and education — his PhD was in education for museums — enabled him to inspire so many people in how to bring history alive. Our intent at the Stewart Museum was to hire young people who showed the potential to be great museologists and we succeeded. We have so many people in the museum world who credit their beginnings to the Stewart Museum.'
Vadeboncoeur organized, directed and supervised about 90 temporary and travelling museum exhibitions in addition to three re-imaginings of the permanent exhibition. He contributed to all the museum's publications related to its collections and directed the reorganization of the museum, including the permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, the offices, the workshops the reserves and libraries following work to bring the building up to code carried out between 2009 and 2011.
Because of relationships he developed with universities with programs in museum studies, he represented the museum in Canada and beyond. He taught in the masters program in museum studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal, from where he earned a doctorate in museology. He welcomed dozens of interns at the Stewart from Quebec and elsewhere.
Vadeboncoeur chaired the Museums Committee of the Commission franco-québécoise des lieux de mémoire communs and was a member of the ICOMAM Council: ICOMAM is an international committee of the International Council of Museums specializing in museums and collections of arms and military history.
'The Stewart Museum had a lot of international friends in the museum world and Guy was right there with them,' Bolton said.
There were collaborations, for instance, with museums and other institutions in France. The museum oversaw the transformation of Manoir de Limoëlou in St-Malo, France, the house that once belonged to Jacques-Cartier, into a museum. David Stewart was able to purchase the collection of Abbé Nollet, a French professor who developed scientific demonstration instruments for the kings of France — and Vadeboncoeur was involved an exhibition shown at Versailles.
The Stewart Museum collaborated in an exhibition with the Jewish Public Library held at the museum in 1990, Planets, Potions and Parchments, that featured a fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls among more than 200 scientific manuscripts, books, maps, amulets, and magical texts brought together from collections in Europe, Canada, Israel, Great Britain and the United States.
Vadeboncoeur is survived by his wife, Jocelyne, his children, Amélie and Alexandre, and their spouses, and his three grandchildren.