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The Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers (CPE) was founded in 1916 as a successor to the short-lived Association of Canadian Etchers, founded in 1885. The Society began holding annual exhibitions in 1919 at the Art Gallery of Toronto. Usually these were part of larger exhibitions. The Society held exhibitions in other locations in Toronto from 1933 to 1959. The Society was formally incorporated on 1935. Between 1960 and 1974 the Society's annual exhibitions were each held in a different city in Ontario. The Society merged with the Canadian Society of Graphic Art in 1976 to form the Print and Drawing Council of Canada.

Beth (Mary Elizabeth) Southcott, née Woolger, 1923-2004, was an amateur artist and art writer based in the Clarkson area of Mississauga. She was interested in visual art throughout her life, taking courses as a child at the (then) Art Gallery of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art, and later serving as the director of Visual Arts Mississauga. Southcott became interested in Indigenous art as an outcome of a course she took at Erindale College (now University of Toronto Mississauga) in 1975. Her book The Sound of the Drum is an original contribution to the historiography of Anishinaabe art and its reception by settler audiences.

Randall Speller is a historian of book illustration who worked for many years as a librarian at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Robert Stacey (1949-2007) was an art historian, author, editor, picture editor and curator based out of Toronto. He wrote numerous books and articles on C.W. Jefferys and many other aspects relating to Canadian art and graphic design, with titles including The Hand Holding the Brush: Self Portraits by Canadian Artists, Canadian Bookplates, Massanog: the art of Bon Echo, and Sir Daniel Wilson (1816-1892): ambidextrous polymath. Robert Stacey was the grandson of C.W. Jefferys.

Tess Boudreau Taconis (1919-2007) was a photographer known for her portraits of Canadian artists in the 1960s. Born Mary Theresa Boudreau in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, she grew up in southwestern Ontario. A skilled darkroom technician, she was working in Paris when in 1950 she met and married Kryn Taconis, a photojournalist born in the Netherlands. The couple moved to Amsterdam and then to Canada in 1959, settling in Toronto. Tess Taconis photographed contemporary artists, particularly those associated with the Isaacs Gallery, such as Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow, William Ronald and Graham Coughtry. Tess Boudreau Taconis died in Guelph, Ontario in 2007. Her work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, among other institutions.

The Tovell family of Toronto, in particular Harold Murchison Tovell (1887-1947), Ruth Massey Tovell (1889-1961) and their son Vincent Massey Tovell (b. 1922), was active in art circles in Toronto for several decades following the First World War. Harold Tovell and Ruth Massey married in 1910 and in 1913-1914 travelled in Europe, visiting the major art galleries. Returning to Toronto, they lived on the eastern edge of the city in Dentonia Park, the Massey estate, until 1936 when they moved to the city centre. The Tovells built a collection of works by Canadian and European artists. In France in 1926 they met French painter Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) through their friend American author and artist Walter Pach (1883-1958). In 1928 they purchased a painting by Duchamp’s older half-brother Jacques Villon (1875-1963) at an exhibition in New York. They met Jacques and Gaby Villon in Paris in 1930 and corresponded with them until the 1960s. The Villons befriended Vincent who visited them in France in the years before the Second World War. From 1941 to 1947, the Tovells lived near Port Hope, Ontario. After her husband’s death, Mrs Tovell returned to live in Toronto. Harold and Ruth Tovell had three other sons: Walter (b. 1916), a geologist and Director of the Royal Ontario Museum 1972-1975, Freeman (b. 1918), diplomat and historian, and Harold (1919-2002), a physician. They bequeathed many of their artworks to the Royal Ontario Museum, the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.