Harold Mortimer-Lamb's name is in the index of almost every book written on the history of Canadian art, yet his place in that world has never been clear. Photographer, writer, painter, promoter--he was a man of many parts and the ideal patron and friend to some of Canada's most famous artists, including A.Y. Jackson, Emily Carr, and Jack Shadbolt. At the centre of his story are his relationships with painter Frederick Varley and young student Vera Weatherbie, whom Mortimer-Lamb, at the age of seventy, eventually married, when she was just thirty. Profusely illustrated with his photos, paintings, and the art he collected, Harold Mortimer-Lamb: The Art Lover brings into focus an unknown chapter in Canadian art history.

Harold Mortimer-Lamb’s name is in the index of almost every book written on the history of Canadian art, yet his place in that world has never been clear. Photographer, writer, painter, promoter—he was a man of many parts and the ideal patron and friend to some of Canada's most famous artists, including A.Y. Jackson, Emily Carr, and Jack Shadbolt. At the centre of his story are his relationships with painter Frederick Varley and young student Vera Weatherbie, whom Mortimer-Lamb, at the age of seventy, eventually married, when she was just thirty. Profusely illustrated with his photos, paintings, and the art he collected, Harold Mortimer-Lamb: The Art Lover brings into focus an unknown chapter in Canadian art history.

A captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada’s best-known artists, Jackson’s Wars follows A.Y. Jackson’s education and progress as a painter before he was a well-known artist and his time on the battlefield in Europe, before he cast his lot in with a group of like-minded Toronto artists. Jackson fought many battles: he was a feisty and opinionated combatant when he crossed swords with critics, collectors, museums, galleries, and fellow painters as an emerging artist. Moving from Montreal to Toronto in 1913, he became a key figure in a landscape movement that was determined to depict Canada in a bold new way, only to have a war dash the group's collective ambitions. Alone among his close associates, Jackson enlisted to fight with the 60th Infantry Battalion. Wounded at Sanctuary Wood in 1916, he returned to the field of combat as an official war artist – the first Canadian artist appointed, the only infantryman in the program – and militated for other Canadian appointments to what is now a storied moment of creation for such artists as F.H. Varley and Arthur Lismer. Jackson produced some of Canada’s most memorable depictions of the world’s first industrial-scale conflict, even as he reckoned with the anguish caused by the mysterious death of his close friend Tom Thomson. A life-changing event for soldiers, families, and nations alike, the First World War has been understood as a moment of stasis in the visual arts in Canada – the dead ground from which the Group of Seven emerged in the early 1920s. Douglas Hunter shows how Jackson’s war was a moment of intense transformation and artistic development on the canvas as well as an experience that tempered a young man into a constructive elder statesman for Canadian art. On his return home he was not only instrumental in the formation of the Group of Seven in Toronto, but a key figure for the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal. Jackson’s Wars is a story of brotherhoods of painters and soldiers, shot through with inspiration, ambition, trauma, and loss, on the home front as well as on the battlefield. Hunter widens and deepens A.Y. Jackson’s world of friends, family, and colleagues to capture the life of a complex man and the crucial events and relationships behind the creation of Canada’s best-known art collective.

Identifies and summarizes thousands of books, article, exhibition catalogues, government publications, and theses published in many countries and in several languages from the early nineteenth century to 1981.

"The life and work of Canadian artist Molly Lamb Bobak."--

Frederick Horsman Varley was unique among the members of the Group of Seven. One of the greatest Canadian portraitists of the twentieth century, he is an intriguing example of an artist who, despite his fame as a portrait painter, remains better known for his landscapes. This is due mainly to his position as one of the founding members of the Group of Seven and their deliberate attempt to raise awareness of our national identity by depicting the Canadian landscape. Even though many public collections across the country, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Vancouver Art Gallery, display some of Varley's best-known portraits, these works do not easily fit into the conventional mould of the Group of Seven. Nearly four decades after his death, Varley's portraits are still not fully acknowledged. The release of this beautifully illustrated bilingual volume coincides with the opening of an unprecedented exhibition of his portraiture.

Commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of Tom Thomson's death, cultural historian Gregory Klages offers the deepest look to date at the historical record, testimony, and archives about the artist’s tragic and mysterious demise. Putting the whole range of theories under examination, he separates truth from legend in this great Canadian mystery.

An exploration of the lives and works of the members of the Beaver Hall Group. Founded in 1920, the group was in the vanguard of bringing Modernism to Canada and is notable for its inclusion of women who now rank among the country’s most outstanding painters.

Notions of identity have long structured women’s art. Dynamics of race, class, and gender have shaped the production of artworks and oriented their subsequent reassessments. Arguably, this is especially true of art by women, and of the socially engaged criticism that addresses it. If identity has been a problem in women’s art, however, is more identity the solution? In this study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art in Canada, Kristina Huneault offers a meditation on the strictures of identity and an exploration of forces that unsettle and realign the self. Looking closely at individual artists and works, Huneault combines formal analysis with archival research and philosophical inquiry, building nuanced readings of objects that range from the canonical to the largely unknown. Whether in miniature portraits or genre paintings, botanical drawings or baskets, women artists reckoned with constraints that limited understandings of themselves and others. They also forged creative alternatives. At times identity features in women’s artistic work as a failed project; at other times it marks a boundary beyond which they were able to expand, explore, and exult. Bringing together settler and indigenous forms of cultural expression and foregrounding the importance of colonialism within the development of art in Canada, I’m Not Myself at All observes and reactivates historical art by women and prompts readers to consider what a less restrictive conceptualization of selfhood might bring to current patterns of cultural analysis.

From the vanguard of Modernism in Montreal, the Beaver Hall Group included painters who are now ranked among Canada's most distinguished artists. Evelyn Walters brings her extensive knowledge of the group to paint a picture of the artists' lives and their works in this two-book bundle. More than 130 reproductions bring to light paintings that have lain hidden for more than fifty years. Includes: The Beaver Hall Group and Its Legacy The Women of Beaver Hall