Vancouver Art Gallery

This guide to the Vancouver Art Gallery traces the life of Francis Rattenbury, the architect who designed this building as a courthouse in the early 1900s after talking his way into major commissions with almost no reputation. It follows him decades later to a seaside house in England, where he had left his first wife for a much younger woman, Alma, and where the couple's eighteen-year-old chauffeur, George Stoner, moved into their home and became her lover. Rattenbury, by most accounts, simply tolerated it.