DONNA CHILD FINE ART - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Chief Designer
• Member of the Group of Seven

The youngest member of the Group of Seven, Alfred Joseph (A.J.) "Cass" Casson was a painter known for his images of Ontario villages and for his championing of the medium of watercolour. He was also an exceptional commercial artist who, in more than three decades at Sampson-Matthews, played a key role in the development of silkscreen printing in Canada. Born in Toronto in 1898, Casson was apprenticed to a Hamilton lithography company at age 15, gradually moving from sweeping floors to blocking in letters on the stones used for printing billboards, learning the skills of a commercial artist in his second job at nearby Commercial Engravers. A move back to Toronto in 1916 with his family saw Casson designing labels, newspaper ads and Eaton's catalogues as well as beginning landscape painting and taking art classes at night. In late 1919 Casson was hired by Rous and Mann as assistant to the company's chief designer, Franklin Carmichael. He considered this "perhaps the single most important happening of (his) career". Carmichael was mentor to Casson, allowing him rare creativity and freedom in the commercial art environment and was the biggest influence on Casson's art, both commercial and fine. Carmichael took Casson sketching and camping and introduced him to his fellow Group of Seven members. In 1926 Casson followed Carmichael to Sampson-Matthews, he was invited to join the Group of Seven and he bought his first car and started exploring southern Ontario on sketching trips. Around that time Sampson-Matthews began silks screening and Casson led the experimenting, creating some of the first commercial silkscreen prints in Canada. Over the next three decades Casson built a reputation as a consummate designer producing some of the best commercial work ever created in Canada. He oversaw the Sampson-Matthews silkscreen program from its inception.

Job Titles:

• Associate Director
• Web Designer

Job Titles:

• Canadian Artist

Canadian artist Emily Carr was born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1871. She studied in San Francisco in 1889-1895, and in 1899 she travelled to England, where she was involved with the St. Ives group and with Hubert von Herkomer's private school. She lived in France in 1910 where the work of the Fauves influenced colour in her work and where she came into contact with Frances Hodgkins. Discouraged by her lack of artistic success, she returned to Victoria where she came close to giving up art altogether.2

Born in Toronto and trained at the Ontario College of Art, Franklin Arbuckle is well known for both his fine and commercial art. During the Second World War he worked as a commercial artist, returning to freelance work in 1944. His easel paintings, both landscapes and city scenes, mixed realism with impressionism. For many years Arbuckle's work was a feature in MacLean's and other magazines; he also created murals for clients such as the Canadian Pacific train The Canadian (1954-55) and Hamilton City Hall (1962) and designed tapestries for the Royal Bank of Canada building in Toronto.1

Job Titles:

• President of the Royal Canadian Academy

Born at Meaford, Ontario, Haines studied art at the central Ontario School of Art in Toronto and at the Academy Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp Belgium. In 1924 his etchings were featured in a graphic arts show at the Art Gallery of Toronto. Four years later he became a curator at the same gallery, only leaving in 1932 to become principal of the Ontario College of Art, a position he held until his retirement in 1951. In 1939 Haines became president of the Royal Canadian Academy; he also helped design a Victory Torch that was presented to the British Prime Minister Churchill to symbolize Canada's pledge to help defeat Hitler. Haines is best known for his gentle landscapes. In the catalog to a retrospective of his work held at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1961, Charles comfort wrote that "Fred Haines was a whole man… he has made a very real contribution to Canadian life and culture and will always be remembered as an artist, an educator, an able administrator, a loyal friend, and a Christian gentleman." 1

Born in Oshawa, Ontario, Isabel McLaughlin studied art in Toronto, New York, Paris and Mexico. She had her first solo show in 1933 at the Art Gallery of Toronto; it included her striking paintings of northern Ontario mining towns. Though she was influenced by the Group of Seven, McLaughlin's work became bolder and more modern later in her career. She was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters and exhibited often with that group, painting still lifes and other motifs but always returning to landscapes.

Job Titles:

• Artist, Designer

Joseph Ernest "Sammy" Sampson was an influential artist, designer and printer who was the co-founder, senior partner and president of Sampson-Matthews Limited, which he ran with Charles Matthews for 28 years. Sampson was born in Liverpool, England, in 1887, the eldest son of William Sampson, a superintendent engineer of Canadian Pacific Steamships. He studied at the Liverpool School of Art and several art academies in Paris before moving in 1913 to Toronto, where he became art director at Stone Limited (later Rolph-Clark-Stone Limited), a fine printing company. In 1918 he and a colleague, Charles Matthews, left to form their own company, Sampson-Matthews Limited. Sampson-Matthews soon became one of Canada's best known "one-stop shops" for advertising, printing and publishing. The company's reputation for high-quality art and design work was due largely to Sampson, who took the creative lead while his partner Matthews ran the business end. Sampson himself designed some of the iconic posters of this first golden age of advertising, including striking works for Canadian National Railways and a series of Victory Loan posters produced by the firm during the Second World War. As a painter, Sampson was best known for his portraits, figures and landscapes in both watercolour and oil. He painted various works for the Canadian War Records and War Savings Drives, including portraits of officers such as Lieutenant General G.L. McNaughton (1941) and Armistice Day Toronto (1919, now in the Canadian War Museum). His portraits of two speakers of the Ontario legislature, Norman Otto Hiple and James Howard Clark, still hang in the provincial legislature building in Queen's Park, Toronto. The Canadian War Museum has a collection of Sampson's work, including his Victory Loan posters, and his paintings are held by various public institutions, including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Government of Ontario art collection. 1

Lauren Stewart Harris was a founder and leading member of the Group of Seven and a lifelong experimenter who had a profound influence on three generations of Canada's artists. Harris was born into privilege: his father was the secretary of a firm which became part of the Massey-Harris Company, the world's largest manufacturer of farm machinery, and he was free to devote himself entirely to his art. He attended the Central Technical School and St. Andrew's College in Toronto and from age 19 (1904-8) studied in Berlin. He was interested in philosophy in Eastern thought, and later joined the Toronto lodge of the International Theosophical Society. In 1909, Harris began drawing and painting in downtown Toronto; two years later he was developing his art with J.E.H. MacDonald and Tom Thompson. In 1913, he and MacDonald went to an exhibition of Scandinavian art in Buffalo, New York, which inspired the men's vision for a homegrown Canadian art born of the land. Harris was the main driving force that brought together the varying talents and temperaments that formed the Group of Seven. With MacDonald, he financed boxcar trips for the artists to visit the Algoma region, northeast of Lake Superior. "Without Harris there would have been no Group of Seven," said fellow member AY Jackson; "he provided the stimulus; It was he who encouraged us always to take the bolder course, to find new trails." During the 1920s Harris's work became more abstract and simplified. His stark, radiant landscapes of northern Ontario and the Arctic, which he visited in 1927 and 1930 with Jackson, incorporated the Theosophical concept of nature, and are among the most powerful works of Canadian art. Never one to stop experimenting, Harris was the co-founder of the Canadian Group of Painters, which succeeded the Group of Seven in 1933. He moved into non-objective art and helped found the Transcendental Painting Group in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1939. The next year he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he entered the abstract phase that would carry him through the rest of his career. Harris died in Vancouver in 1970 and was buried in the grounds of the McMichael Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. Since his death his paintings, especially his stark late-1920s northern works, have sold for huge prices, making him one of the highest selling Canadian artists of all time. 1

Born in England, Leonard Brooks moved to Canada in 1912. Primarily self-taught as a painter, he was soon actively exhibiting and teaching. He enlisted in the navy in 1943 and became an official war artist, painting many maritime military subjects (his Sampson-Matthews silkscreen Halifax Harbour includes warships, making it one of the few prints to have a military subject). After the war Brooks and his wife, Reva, moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where they remained for more than half a century. Brooks worked in many media and experimented with abstraction. He was also a popular teacher who wrote a number of books on painting.

Stanley Turner was born in Aylesbury, England, and studied art in London before immigrating to Canada around 1903. In 1911 he moved to Toronto, where he joined the advertising department of T. Eaton Company and then Rous and Mann, where he worked under Group of Seven founder Franklin Carmichael. Turner is best known for his expertly wrought etchings of street scenes of Toronto and Quebec City and for colour woodcuts in a Japanese style. He also did illustrations for historical novels and magazines, including Maclean's, and was a skilled draughtsman, cartographer and printmaker. During the Second World War he was twice commissioned by the Globe and Mail to prepare illustrated war maps. 1

Job Titles:

• Superintendent