b. 1891 - d. 1941
Sir Frederick Grant Banting, KBE, MC, FRS, FRSC, co-discoverer of insulin, Nobel laureate, medical scientist, painter. Banting is best known as one of the discoverers of insulin. Following the discovery of insulin, he became Canada’s first professor of medical research at the University of Toronto. Banting was also an accomplished amateur painter with links to A.Y. Jackson and the Group of Seven.
Read MoreBorn in Calgary in 1906, Bates was one of Canada’s early modernists and one of the most powerful artists of his generation. A painter, printmaker, architect and poet, Bates brought European modernism to western Canada.
Read Moreb. 1846 - d. 1923
Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith received his early art training in London, England and came to Montréal in 1867. He worked in photographic firms in Montréal and then in Hamilton, Ontario, and Toronto, and exhibited primarily watercolours of sporting subjects.
Read MoreRachel Berman was an American-born Canadian painter and children's book illustrator, who lived and worked in Canada, the United States, and Ireland.
Once known as Susan King, she discovered her original birth name, birth date, and the names of her biological parents when she was 52. This experience led her to reclaim her long-lost name.
Read MoreDavid Blackwood
B. 1941
O.C., O. Ont., R.C.A.
David Blackwood is one of Canada’s most respected visual storytellers. His narrative work reflects the legend, toughness and landscape of Newfoundland- an historic journey not that far removed in essence and time.
Blackwood’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with over 90 solo shows and scores of group exhibitions. He has been the subject of two major retrospective exhibitions and the National Film Board’s 1974 Academy-Award nominated documentary film BLACKWOOD.
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Along with Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven, and David Milne, Emily Carr was one of the preeminent, and perhaps most original, Canadian painters of the first half of the twentieth century; she was also one of the only major female artists in either North America or Europe of that period. In Carr’s mature paintings, like the great Indian Church (1929) in the Art Gallery of Ontario, nature is a furious vortex of organic growth depicted with curving shapes that create the impression of constant movement and transformation. By comparison, the human element – churches, houses, totem poles – seem small and fragile.
Read Moreb. 1911 - d. 1990
Born in Toronto, Alan Collier studied under J.E.H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael at the Ontario College of Art (1929-33)
Read Moreb. 1890 - d. 1956
FitzGerald spent almost his whole life in Winnipeg painting, drawing and sketching quiet contemplative scenes. He trained in Winnipeg, Pittsburgh and NY. He was principal of the Winnipeg School of Art 1929-47, and exhibited with the Group of Seven in 1930 - joining the Group formally in 1932 - but remained a loner. From a decorative and impressionistic style FitzGerald moved to a pointillist technique.
Read MoreClarence Gagnon, engraver, painter (b at Montréal 8 Nov 1881; d there 5 Jan 1942). After studying at the École normale du Plateau in Montréal, he received his artistic training from the painter William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal 1897-1900. The generosity of art patron James Morgan allowed him to go to Paris and study in the studio of painter Jean-Paul Laurens. Gagnon distinguished himself early in his career by the quality of his engravings, and won a gold medal at the St Louis Exhibition in 1904 and an honourable mention the following year at the Salon des artistes français in Paris. Returning to Canada 1909, he divided his time between Montréal and Baie-St-Paul. He became a member of the Royal Society of Canada and later he was elected associate of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 1923, he received the Trevor Prize of the Salmagundi Club of New York. He illustrated Le Grand Silence blanc(1929) and the deluxe edition of Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine (1933). Upon his return from a second stay in France from 1922-36, U de Montréal awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Born in Victoria, BC, Robert Genn was formally trained at the University of Victoria, the University of BC and the Art Centre School in Los Angeles, California. Throughout his career Genn garnered an international reputation for his ability to capture the colour and form of the Canadian landscape with strong brush strokes. He is most well known for painting west coast and rocky mountain scenes.
Read More1906 - 1998
ASA CSGA FCA PDCC RCA
Henry George Glyde trained at the Royal College of Art, London (1926-30). He came to Canada in 1935 to teach drawing in Calgary at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art and in 1936 became head of the art department. He was also head of the painting division of the Banff School of Fine Arts (1936-66). In 1937 he began teaching community art classes with the Dept of Extension, U of A, where he went on to establish the Division of Fine Art. He taught there between 1946 and 1966.
Read MoreEdward W. (Ted) Godwin, OC was a Canadian artist who was part of the Regina Five, a group of five artists (Ken Lochhead, Art McKay, Ron Bloore and Douglas Morton) all based in Regina, Saskatchewan. He is also known for his large tartan paintings.
Born in Calgary, Alberta, he attended the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and Art from 1951 to 1955.
Read More1885 - 1970
Lawren Harris was a leading figure in Canadian Art. His paintings are some of the most iconic symbols of Canadian art from the 20th century. Through a lifetime of leadership in the arts; from financing the famous Algoma box car trips to building the Studio Building in Toronto which helped provide space to artists, his impact on the arts in Canada is profound. He is one of the Founding Members of the Group of Seven, Canadian Group of Painters and the Transcendental Painting Group.
1926 - 2015
<br>OC
The best known of the Yukon painters, Harrison has won international recognition for his painting as well as for his children's stories and illustrations (The Last Horizon, 1980; The Cremation of Sam McGee, 1986). He studied art at the Hartlepool College of Art in England and later earned an art teacher's diploma. During his schoolteacher days in Carcross, YT, in late 1968, his work underwent a dramatic transformation. He simplified his forms almost to a childlike form and introduced sweeping rhythms and lush colours. His trademark paintings often depict faceless people, with the odd dog or raven, standing in front of sunken houses. The backdrop is always composed of colourful lakes, brilliant skies, and mountains that seem to blend into one another. Harrison was the first Canadian artist-illustrator to be shown at the International Children's Book Exhibition in Bologna, Italy, and at the Otani Memorial Museum of Art in Nishinomiya, Japan. He became a Member of the Order of Canada in 1987.
Read More1913 - 2007
E.J. Hughes’s paintings are best known for their strong and appealing images of the landscape and seascape of British Columbia. His distinctive style is marked by the use of flattened space, skewed perspective and simplified shapes. He is a regional painter, whose art relates directly to the unique and powerful geography of the Canadian west coast.
Read Moreb. 1812 - d. 1901
Otto Jacobi was a German-Canadian artist. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.
In 1860, Jacobi emigrated to Canada and settled in Montreal where he spent the next ten years. While he continued to ship paintings for sale back to Europe, he and his family remained in North America. For a short time Jacobi was a teacher at the Ontario College of Art and Design. His works were presented at the annual Art Association of Montreal (starting in 1880) and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, which he became president of in 1890.
Read MoreFrank (Franz) Johnston was born in Toronto in 1888. He studied in Germany from 1904 to 1907. In 1910, he left for the United States where he studied art in Philadelphia and worked in commercial design in New York.
Read Moreb. 1905 - d. 1989
Illingworth "Buck" Kerr was a Canadian painter, illustrator and writer. He is best known for his landscape paintings of the Saskatchewan and Alberta prairies and foothills. Kerr attended Central Technical School, Toronto, and Ontario College of Art. He also studied at Westminster School of Art, London, in 1936 and, returning to Canada, taught at Vancouver School of Art (1945-47). In 1947 he became director of the art department of the Provincial Institute of Technology in Calgary. His early landscape style reflects the influence of Lawren Harris in his long, curving brush strokes and emphasis on design. He applied paint heavily, giving relief to an otherwise flat, spatial quality in his work. In later works Kerr used a broken brushstroke style that creates visual tension to counteract this 2-dimensionality. Named to the Order of Canada in 1983, he was given a retrospective exhibition ("Harvest of the Spirit") at 9 major public galleries in 1985.
His works can be seen in the Edmonton Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, in the Lethbridge University Collection and in the Mendel Gallery, Saskatoon.
*Excerpt courtesy of the Canadian Encyclopedia*
Read MoreBorn in rural Nova Scotia in 1903, Lewis suffered from a series of birth defects that left her fingers painfully deformed, her shoulders hunched and her chin pressed into her chest. She spent most of her adult life as a virtual recluse in a cramped one-room house that had no running water or electricity. For more than three decades, the diminutive Lewis eked out a living rendering colorful oil paintings on the most primitive of surfaces — including particleboard, cardboard and wallpaper — which she sold for a few dollars each. Her miserly husband, Everett, often squirrelled away her slim profits, hiding the cash under the floorboards or in jars buried in the garden. At the age of 67, Lewis — who had suffered lung damage due to constant exposure to paint fumes and wood smoke — contracted pneumonia and died in hospital. She was buried in a child's coffin and laid to rest in a pauper's grave.
Read More1885 - 1969
G7, CGP, ,CSPWC, RCA, OC
Arthur Lismer studied at Sheffield School of Art 1899–1906 and the Académie royale des beaux-arts, Antwerp, 1906–07. He moved to Canada in 1911, seeking work as a commercial illustrator. At the Grip Engraving Co. in Toronto, he met J.E.H. MacDonald, Tom Thomson and F. H. Johnston, and, shortly thereafter, Franklin Carmichael.
In 1912 he returned to England to marry and spoke so highly of Canada that F. H. Varley followed him to Toronto. Lismer began his distinguished career as an art educator as principal of the Victoria School of Art and Design (later Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) in Halifax 1916–19. A prodigious worker, he painted views of Halifax harbour and returning troopships for Canadian War Records in 1918–19. He also made sketches of the wreckage created by the Halifax Explosion. Lismer returned to Toronto to become vice-president of the Ontario College of Art and Design (now the Ontario College of Art and Design University) in 1919 and in 1920 became a founding member of the Group of Seven.
Mature Work Lismer's first Canadian paintings were heavily influenced by the 19th century British landscape painter John Constable, French Barbizon school artists like Jean-François Millet, and post-impressionist Belgian painters, but during the 1920s he developed a powerful expressionist style of his own, characterized by raw colour, heavy impasto, deliberately coarse brushwork and compressed simplified forms. In A September Gale, Georgian Bay (1921), for instance, there is a simple, swaying tree in the foreground rendered in earthy reds, the water a rhythmic pattern of whitecaps, the sky roiling with clouds. October on the North Shore, Lake Superior (1927), on the other hand, is a slightly elevated view of lake islands painted in thick earth tones, the water a subtly rippled blue-green, the sky a horizontal sweep of heavy — and also earth-toned — clouds.
Teaching While an accomplished painter, Lismer devoted most of his time to art education. From 1927 to 1938 he was the educational supervisor at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario). In 1932, he undertook a nationwide lecture tour; invitations to conferences in Europe and South Africa followed, and he returned to teach in South Africa in 1936-37.
In 1938, he was visiting professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. He ran the Montreal Children's Art Centre, affiliated with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 1941 to 1967. This activity left Lismer with little time to paint, but he produced many of his most original works after 1930, painting first in the Maritimes and Georgian Bay, and from 1951 at Long Beach, on Vancouver Island, each summer. The lurid, intestinal and claustrophobic qualities of many of these paintings were not to contemporary taste, but have gained acceptance in recent years, for they seem to have developed from a form of deep, personal expressionism. Exerpt Courtesy of Canadian Encyclopedia
Toni Onley is one of British Columbia's most iconic painters. His paintings are part of many institutions' permanent collections, such as the Tate (UK), Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), Museum of Modern Art (NYC), National Gallery Of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, and many others. He was an elected member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, and in 1999 was elected to be a member of the Order of Canada.
Read MoreDaphnie Odjig is recognized as one of Canada's most prominent artists. Her work helped establish the "Woodlands style."
Read MorePlease contact gallery for available works
1919 – 2013
Associated with the Colour Field movement, William Perehudoff and his works hold an important place in contemporary Canadian art history. Central to Perehudoff's work is the emphasis on form, process, and colour rather than brushstrokes or figurative depictions.
Perehudoff was born in 1919 just west of Saskatoon. He left high school after grade 11 to take up farming, but soon became interested in painting, mostly in watercolour. In the 1940s his work was discovered and encouraged by Eva Mendel, a Berlin-trained painter and daughter of Fred Mendel, who would go on to be the founder of the Saskatoon's Mendel Art Gallery.
Perehudoff found inspiration from the vast openness of the prairies, where he would continue to establish himself for most of his career. He studied at the Colorado Springs Art Center from 1948-49, later leaving for New York to study with French Cubist Amédée Ozenfant who would influence Perehudoff and instill the importance of having a significant form and avoiding non-essential elements in his work. Even greater still was the impact of the Emma Lake Artist's Workshops, which enabled Perehudoff to explore new techniques and ways of thinking about his art. For Perehudoff, one of the most notable of these workshops was the 1963 workshop led by American painter Kenneth Noland. During this time, Perehudoff would experiment with the balance between colour, form, and space.
His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Glenbow Museum, Remai Modern, Art Gallery of Ontario, and many others.
Walter Joseph Phillips <br><br>
1884 - 1963<br><br>
Born in 1884 in Barton-Upon-Humber, England, Phillips studied art in Birmingham before pursuing a career as a teacher and commercial artist. Despite enjoying early success as a watercolourist in Britian, Phillips emigrated to Canada, settling in Winnipeg in June 1913. He took up the position as art instructor at St John's Technical High School and quickly established himself in Winnipeg's young art community.
Read MoreSarah Robertson was a member of the group of women painters who studied with William Brymner, Maurice Cullen and Randolph Hewton, and she joined the Beaver Hall Hill group and later the Canadian Group of Painters. She painted landscape (the Laurentians and lower St Lawrence) and went on summer sketching trips with Prudence Heward and A.Y. Jackson. She had a blithe personal vision, different from Group Of Seven patterns. Her choice of subject was often the convent spires or old Martello Towers of Montréal. In the mid-1920s her style hardened into tightly controlled composition, perhaps influenced by Lawren Harris, but by the 1930s she had found confidence and spontaneity in works.
Read Moreb. 1929 - d. 2015
Allen Sapp moved from the Plains Cree reserve to North Battleford, Sask, in 1960 to pursue a career as a professional artist. In 1966, Dr A.B. Gonor arranged for him to be tutored by Wynona Mulcaster of Saskatoon. Gonor continued to work with Sapp, encouraging him to paint the reserve life as he knew it.
Read MoreAnne Savage was based in Montreal, Que. Best known during her lifetime as a pioneer in teaching children's art along progressive lines, Anne Savage's early paintings were initially strongly influenced by the Group of Seven. Later her work showed a lyrical quality of its own, characterized by muted colour, sound rhythm and a late-in-life foray into abstraction. Trained by William Brymner, she was a member of the Beaver Hall Hill group and president of the Canadian Group of Painters (1949, 1960). Savage taught at Baron Byng High School 1922-48 and had a far-reaching influence on Montréal artists of the next generation.
Read MoreB 1909 - 1998
Jack Shadbolt's paintings reflect his experiences living in British Columbia, studying in New York or working overseas during World War II.
Read Moreb. 1925 - d. 2003
Herbert Johannes Josef Siebner was born in Stettin, Prussia, and died in Victoria, B.C. Siebner was an Expressionist painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He studied graphic arts under Max E. A. Richter (1941–43) in Berlin and served in the German Army from 1943 to 1945. After the war, Siebner studied at the Academy for Fine Arts & Culture, Berlin under Prof. Max Kaus and Ernst Shumacher (1946–49), and was soon exhibiting his works in exhibitions and galleries. Siebner emigrated to Canada in 1954, settling in Victoria, BC, where he opened an art studio and began teaching his craft.
Read MoreB. 1926 -
"…the views I favour are the grey mists, the rain-obscured islands and the clouds that hide the details. However much we desire order and clarity in all the details of our lives, there are always unexpected events that cloud and change our course. Life is ragged. The typical weather of the coast is like that, just enough detail to make it interesting but not so clear as to be banal or overwhelming. It can be a metaphor for life.'"
Read MoreA leading contemporary and historic fine art gallery based in Victoria, B.C. Canada. The gallery exhibits and sells art from both established and emerging Canadian artists. Madrona Gallery prides itself on providing a welcoming environment to new and established art collectors alike.
April 27 - May 11
Opening Reception: April 27, 1-3 PM
Artist in Attendance
Meghan Hildebrand returns with her 9th solo exhibition at Madrona Gallery. This collection of new paintings continues to build upon Hildebrand's series of colourful abstract landscapes that invite viewers to dive into and explore.
March 9 - 22 2024
Opening Reception: March 9, 1-3 PM
Pitseolak Qimirpik brings a fresh and fantastical style to his drawings. They bring influences from his well established career as a carver mixed with pop culture, such as cartoons and video games.
Working in this medium allows the artist to expand the scope of his work from individual objects to full narratives. Drawing brings opportunity to express more diverse subject matter and weaves together themes in a way stone does not allow. This will be his first solo-exhibition of drawings in western Canada.
March 30 - April 20
Opening Reception: March 30, 1-3 PM
Madrona Gallery's annual exhibition of works by leading artists of the 20th century. This exhibition features important works by members of the Group of Seven, Emily Carr, E.J.Hughes, Marcelle Ferron, W.J. Phillips, David Blackwood, Jack Shadbolt, Takao Tanabe, Gordon Smith and many others
Madrona Gallery respectfully acknowledges the Lekwungen peoples, on whose traditional lands the gallery stands.
606 View Street
Victoria, BC V8W 1J4
Hours: Mon-Sat. 10am-5:30pm
Sun. Closed
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