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Authority record

F.S. Richardson & Bro.

  • CA QUA06060
  • Corporate body
  • 1853-1925

Frederick Samuel Richardson was a photographer and painter based in Napanee, Ontario.

Cutts, William Malcolm

  • CA QUA12315
  • Person
  • 16 Dec. 1857-29 Jan. 1943

William Malcolm Cutts (December 16, 1857 – January 29, 1943) was a painter of landscapes and marine studies in oil and watercolour.

Cutts was born at Allahabad, India, the child of an East India Company official. His father died in India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and Cutts and his mother moved to England where he attended primary school. As a boy of 13 he had a serious interest in painting. In 1870 he came to Canada with his mother and stepfather and settled in Stratford, Ontario, where he first began to work as an artist. He worked for several years as a fireman on the Grand Trunk Railroad, then moved to Toronto in 1880. He visited England for a short period to study painting.

On his return to Canada he painted portraits for the next 25 years. He visited Ontario towns as a portrait painter. He exhibited portraits, landscapes and marine studies (the latter two he began to paint around 1905) at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts annual shows from 1891 to 1929. With his second wife, Gertrude Spurr Cutts, he lived at St. Ives, Cornwall, England, for three years (1909-1912) and sketched in southern England and Wales. He also painted in Jamaica and eastern United States along the Atlantic seaboard. The Cutts shared a studio in Toronto until 1915 when they settled in Port Perry, Ontario. Like his wife, he died in Port Perry, Gertrude in 1941 and William two years later at the age of 86.

Compton, Anna Rockwell

  • CA QUA06331
  • Person
  • 1853-1928

Anna Rockwell Compton was a portrait painter, born in Port Hope, Ontario.

Bradish, Alvah

  • CA QUA05109
  • Person
  • 1806-19 Apr. 1901

Alvah Bradish (1806, Sherburne, New York - April 19, 1901, Detroit) was an American portrait painter and professor. During his career, he completed over 500 portraits of notable people in New York and Michigan; as well as many people who can no longer be identified. He also painted for brief periods in Canada and Jamaica. There is no record of any formal artistic training he may have had.

He was one of four sons born to Samuel Morton Bradish (1777-1812), a surveyor from Worcester, Massachusetts, and his wife Mary Finch (1778-1843). After his father's death, his family moved to Fredonia, where he grew up.

From 1837 to 1846, he was an itinerant portrait painter, based in Rochester, New York. He was married in 1839, to Lydia Douglass-Houghton; daughter of Judge Jacob Houghton (1777-1861), originally of Boston, and Lydia Douglass (1780-1871). Her brother, Douglass Houghton, would become the first State Geologist of Michigan. They had 3 children.

After 1846, he returned to Fredonia, but also traveled extensively. The year 1849 found him in Kingston, Jamaica, where he sent some specimens of fish to the University of Michigan. This was prompted by the fact that his younger brother, Josiah (1810-1892), who had become a surveyor like his father, had gone to Michigan in 1836, at the invitation of Houghton, and settled there permanently a few years later.

In 1850, Alvah was induced to follow him and settled near Detroit. Two years later, he was engaged to lecture on the fine arts at the University, and presented with an honorary Master of Arts degree, along with the title of Professor. For six years, however, he received no compensation and was not allowed to teach; merely accumulating relevant materials. He finally obtained permission to teach a few courses and, in 1861, the senior class requested that he be permitted to lecture them. In 1863, the courses he had been teaching were summarily discontinued. He then quit his position and returned to Detroit, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

Forbes, Kenneth Keith

  • CA QUA05735
  • Person
  • 4 Jul. 1892-1980

Kenneth Keith Forbes OC RCA (July 4, 1892 – 1980) was a portrait and landscape painter.

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Forbes was the son of John Colin Forbes, R.C.A. (1846–1925) a distinguished portraitist who painted such notable figures as William Gladstone, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Sir Wilfrid Laurier. John Forbes' penultimate commission was the portraits of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra which were destroyed in the 1952 fire in the Parliamentary Library in Ottawa.

Kenneth Forbes studied first at the Newlyn School, Cornwall with Stanhope Forbes, where he won a four-year scholarship to the Hospitalfield House school, Arbroath, Scotland. He won a Chase Scholarship in London with a portrait sketch, and at 19 had a portrait accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy. In all, twelve of Kenneth Forbes portraits were exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Forbes enlisted in the 10th "Pals" Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers in 1914 and was later commissioned from the ranks. He was wounded in action and gassed. Forbes ended his combat service as second in command of the 32nd Battalion, Machine Gun Corps. After being transferred to Lord Beaverbrook's Canadian War Memorials Fund in 1918, Forbes became an official Canadian war artist. Forbes was twice Mentioned in Dispatches for his service.

According to a Toronto newspaper report from April 1918, Forbes had recently received a commission from Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken) to paint a series of official war pictures at the front.

Forbes was also a successful amateur boxer, being light and middle weight champion of the University of London while attending the Slade School of Fine Art. He continued his boxing while in the army, becoming champion of the British Army's 111th Brigade.

In late 1918, Forbes married his wife Jean Mary Edgell, another art student, in London. They had a daughter, June Forbes McCormack

In 1953 Forbes resigned from the Ontario Society of Artists in protest against what he considered the unwarranted recognition and attention given to abstract and what was then called "modern art". In 1958 he resigned from the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts for the same reasons. He later published a short book, Great Art to the Grotesque with an introduction and biographical sketch by Roy Greenaway, as a full statement of his rejection of the artistic worth of abstract or "Modern Art".

In 1958, Forbes, Manley MacDonald, Victor Llewellyn Child, Gordon Roy Conn and others established the Ontario Institute of Painters as a body for traditional or "realist" artists. Members included Douglas Ferguson Elliott, J. R. Tate, and Marion Long.

Forbes was awarded the Thomas R. Proctor Prize for portraiture by the National Academy of Design, New York (Now known as the National Academy Museum and School) on two occasions: 1932 and 1939.

In 1967, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his contributions to the arts as a landscape and portrait painter". In 1972 he had a book published, Great Art to the Grotesque.

Kenneth Forbes died in Toronto on February 25, 1980.

Grier, Edmund Wyly

  • CA QUA05740
  • Person
  • 26 Nov. 1862-7 Dec. 1957

Sir Edmund Wyly Grier RCA, also known as E. Wyly Grier, was an Australian-born Canadian portrait painter.

Grier first came to Canada with his parents in 1876 and attended Upper Canada College but when he graduated, he and his parents went back to England so that he could study at the Slade School of Art in London. He studied at the Slade with Alphonse Legros, in Rome at the Scuola Libera del Nudo, and in Paris at the Académie Julian with Adolphe Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury. He exhibited from 1886 to 1895 at the Royal Society of British Artists and at the Royal Academy. In 1890, he won a gold medal at the Paris Salon. In 1891, he returned to Canada to stay, opening a portrait studio in Toronto.

He painted numerous portraits of politicians, corporate leaders and other notable contemporaries, his first commissioned portrait being in 1888 and his last in 1947. Through his portraits, Grier won recognition and admission to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1894, becoming its president in 1929-1939. In 1901, he won a silver medal at the Pan-American Exhibition at Buffalo. He was active in several arts organizations, including the Ontario Society of Artists (c. 1896) (President, 1908-1913), and was a founding member and second president of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto.

Grier received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law from the University of Bishop’s College in 1934. In 1935, he was made a Knight Bachelor by the government of Richard Bedford Bennett, the first Canadian to receive a knighthood in recognition of his work as an artist. In 1937 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Corresponding Academician.

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