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Doris Jean McCarthy (1910-2010) was a Canadian artist born in Calgary, Alberta, but long associated with the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. She entered the Ontario College of Art in 1925 and studied under Arthur Lismer, JEH MacDonald, JW Beatty and Emanuel Hahn, graduating in 1930. She became an art teacher and travelled widely within Canada and Europe during school vacations. She has been a member of the Ontario Society of Artists, the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, and was elected an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy. She is represented in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the London Public Library and Art Museum and in many private collections. She received in honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto and was honoured by the City of Scarborough in 1996. During her career she assembled files on Canadian women artists gathered by friends in every province, with the intention of creating a book on the subject. In the early 1990s, realizing that the task was larger than anticipated, she offered her files to her friend, Lora Senechal Carney, a professor in the Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. Professor Carney also kept files on Canadian artists as background for her research and writing on various topics in North American modern and contemporary art. The files were amalgamated and used by Professor Carney until 2005.

David Brown Milne (Burgoyne, Ontario 1882-Bancroft, Ontario 1953) was a painter and etcher; he is widely considered to be among the most outstanding Canadian artists. He worked as a schoolteacher before deciding to study painting in New York where, in 1903, he enrolled in the Art Students’ League. Milne supported himself through commercial artwork but actively and successfully developed his own painting, exhibiting five canvases in the famous Armory Show of 1913. His friends during this period included James (“René”) Clarke, with whom he maintained a correspondence for many years. In 1916, Milne and his wife Patsy (née May Frances Hagerty), whom he had married in 1912, left the city and settled in Boston Corners, New York. In late 1917 Milne joined the Canadian army as a private, and in 1918 was appointed as a war artist to record the locations of battles that had involved Canadian troops. Milne returned to Boston Corners in 1919, where he spent most of his winters until 1928, summering in the Adirondacks. He moved to Ottawa for one year in 1923, when the National Gallery of Canada bought six of his watercolours. In 1928, Milne moved permanently back to Ontario (he separated from his wife in 1933), spending extended periods of time alone in the wilderness regions north of Toronto. Palgrave, a short drive from Toronto, became Milne’s home from 1930 to 1933, and from 1933 to 1939 he lived in a cabin on Six Mile Lake near Georgian Bay. He maintained an interest in the Toronto art scene and developed a small group of patrons including Alice and Vincent Massey, and Douglas Duncan of the Picture Loan Society, who acted as Milne’s agent and dealer for many years. He met his second wife Kathleen Pavey in 1938 and lived with her from 1939; their only child David Jr. was born in 1941. The Milnes lived in Uxbridge from 1940 to 1946. From 1947 Milne lived and worked at Baptiste Lake, with Kathleen and David Jr. joining him periodically. As Milne’s health deteriorated, the family moved to Bancroft to be closer to Baptiste Lake. Milne died at Bancroft in December 1953. His work is represented in numerous public collections, notably the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

James Wilson Morrice (1865-1924) was a Canadian painter. He was born in Montreal and studied at the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall law school. Although he was called to the Ontario Bar in 1889, he never practised law. Instead, he went to France in 1890 and studied art in Paris at the Académie Julian and with painters Henri Harpignies and James McNeill Whistler. Morrice returned to Canada often to visit and became a member of the Canadian Art Club in Toronto around 1907. On several of those occasions, he painted scenes of Quebec City and the surrounding countryside—his chief Canadian works. Among Canadian painters of the day, Curtis Williamson, Maurice Cullen and William Brymner were colleagues and friends. He travelled extensively in Europe but lived for the most part in Paris, exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne and associating with artists like Henri Matisse and Robert Henri and writers such as Arnold Bennett and Somerset Maugham. His trips to North Africa and the Caribbean produced some of his most colourful canvases. Morrice is generally considered the earliest Canadian painter to achieve an international reputation. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery in Ottawa and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, as well as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Tate Gallery, London. He died in Tunis in 1924.

Edmund Montague Morris (1871-1913) was a Canadian portraitist, landscape painter and author. Born in Perth, Ontario, he studied in Toronto privately as well as at Toronto Art Students’ League 1889-91, and in New York at the Art Students’ League, 1891-92. Between 1893 and 1896 Morris was a student at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He returned to Toronto in 1896 to set up a studio and became involved in art societies, including the Royal Canadian Academy (ARCA [associate] 1898), the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto. A founding member of the Canadian Art Club in 1907, he was its secretary for several years. He was on the council of the Art Museum of Toronto—now the Art Gallery of Ontario—from 1909. Beginning in 1906 Morris produced the works for which he is chiefly known, portraits in pastels of Canadian aboriginal leaders. Many of these, executed during extensive travel in the Canadian West, were done on commission from the governments of Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan to be hung in provincial legislature buildings. Morris also painted landscapes, especially of scenes along the St Lawrence River in Quebec. It was while working at Portneuf near Quebec City that he drowned in August 1913. He is buried in Toronto. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and other galleries, especially in Western Canada.

Jean-Baptiste Norman Henry Morrisseau (1931–2007), known primarily as Norval Morrisseau, was a Canadian Anishinaabe painter and printmaker who signed his work with his Ojibwa name “Copper Thunderbird.” A self-taught artist, he was born at Sand Point reserve near Beardmore, Ont. At the age of six, he was sent to a Roman Catholic residential school for two years, after which he attended a local community school. In 1957, he married Harriet Kakegamic (1935–1995) with whom he had several children. They lived in the Red Lake area and elsewhere in northwestern Ontario. In later years, the artist stayed in Nanaimo, B.C.
In a manner known as the Woodland Style he is known for initiating, Norval Morrisseau painted in thick black outlines and bright colours, basing his images on Anishinaabe cultural sources and Christian symbols. Several of his earliest solo exhibitions were held at the Pollock Gallery, with which he was associated until the gallery closed in 1981. In 1978, Norval Morrisseau was made a member of the Order of Canada. He was also a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Professional National Indian Artists Incorporation (“Indian Group of Seven”). He retired from painting in 2002.
Norval Morrisseau died in Toronto in 2007. His works are in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ont.), the McMichael Canadian Collection and other public art museums in Canada.

Kathleen Jean Munn (1887-1974) was a modernist Canadian painter active in Toronto between the World Wars. She was the youngest of six children born to a Toronto jeweler who died when she was four (of an infection caused by the impact from a champagne cork) leaving her mother to manage the family business. Her talent for drawing was encouraged by her maternal grandmother, an accomplished amateur painter, and she was sent to study at the Westbourne School with F. McGillivray Knowles from 1904 to 1907. Knowles encouraged personal expression and an understanding of the principles of art and Munn thrived in this environment. In 1909 she began to exhibit Barbizon inspired landscapes at the OSA, RCA and CNE exhibitions, moving through periods influenced by Whistler, Corot, Puvis de Chavannes and the post-impressionists. About 1912 Munn first traveled to New York to study at the Art Student’s League and in 1914 she was awarded first prize at the Summer School in Woodstock NY. In 1915-16 she began a series of landscapes in which she showed a mastery of modernist techniques. Her association with the Art Student’s League, whose teachers were early proponents of modernism, was an important influence. Her notebooks show that she was reading extensively and broadly in the areas of literature, philosophy and aesthetics. She studied Jay Hambridge’s mathematical principles, the concept of ‘dynamic symmetry’ and Denman Ross’s colour theory. She seems to have been drawn to writers who proposed an underlying system of order and logic as a basis for individual expression. She also toured Britain and the major art centres of continental Europe in 1920, accompanied by her sister, and this trip seems to have encouraged her quest for a means to express religious and spiritual themes in a contemporary fashion. She was ultimately uncomfortable with complete abstraction and believed that art should express a larger purpose, influenced by readings of Blavatsky, Blake, Whitman, and others. The Group of Seven shared her interest in the spiritual content of painting but she was intolerant of their nationalism; of her contemporaries she formed the closest bonds with Bertram Brooker and Lemoine Fitzgerald. Her studio, in a large room overlooking the ravine at the family home at 320 Spadina Avenue, was visited often by Brooker. The household consisted of three unmarried siblings: Will (Jr.), who ran the family business, May, a teacher who ran the household, and Kathleen. During the 1920’s she began to work on a series of paintings that explored Christian themes and she devoted the 1930’s to the subject of the Passion. Two major drawings from this series were purchased by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1945. She exhibited a number of these drawings with Fitzgerald and Brooker at the Malloney Galleries in Toronto in 1935 but there as little critical response. Discouragement at her lack of critical success, combined with the death of her brother in 1935 and her sister’s increasing disability, led to the end of her artistic output around 1939. Most of her work remained in family hands. The Art Gallery of Toronto exhibited her Passion drawings in several group shows in the 1940’s and the Willistead Art Gallery in Windsor included her Ascension in a 1954 show of drawings. She died twenty years later, in October 1974.

Lucius Richard O’Brien (1832–1899) was a Canadian painter best known for his landscape paintings in oil and watercolour. Born near Barrie in Upper Canada, he attended Upper Canada College in Toronto 1844–1846, where he studied art under artist and architect John G. Howard. In 1856 he moved to Orillia, Ont. and then to Toronto in 1870. After a career in business, O’Brien began landscape painting in 1872. Lucius O’Brien was vice-president of the Ontario Society of Artists 1874–1880 and soon after became the first president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. His contribution to the first annual exhibition of the Academy was Sunrise on the Saguenay, Cape Trinity (1880), among his most famous works. O’Brien was instrumental in 1876 in founding the Ontario School of Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design University) and was the editor of the successful publication Picturesque Canada (1882–1884), which featured his own work along with that of other artists. His artistic travels took him from the Atlantic coast of Canada to the Pacific; he was one of the first artists invited to travel to and paint the Rocky Mountains on the newly completed Canadian Pacific Railway in 1886. The varied landscapes of the country are rendered in his paintings in a poetic realist style. His works are in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada and other public art museums. Lucius O’Brien married Margaret St John (d. 1866) in 1860 and Katherine Jane (Brough) Parker in 1888. No children were born of either marriage. He died in Toronto at the age of 67 and was buried in Shanty Bay, Ont near where he was born.

Lawrence Arthur Colley Panton (1894-1954) was a Canadian painter, educator and academician active in Toronto from the 1930s until his death. Born in England, he immigrated to Canada at 17. He served in the Army during 1916-1919 and studied art in the evening after his return from the war. In Toronto, he worked at Rous and Mann as a designer until 1924 when he began his teaching career, first at the Central Technical School and then at Western Technical School (1926-37), Northern Vocational School (1937-51) and finally principal of the Ontario College of Art (1951-54). In 1920 he married Marion Pye; their son Charles was born in 1921 and died in action in 1944. Panton was active in a number of organizations, including the Ontario Society of Artists (President 1931-37), the Canadian Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, the Canadian Group of Painters, The Royal Canadian Academy and the Arts and Letters Club (President 1953-54).

Sybille Christiane Pflug (née Schütt) (1936-1972), German-Canadian realist painter, was born in Berlin, Germany and died of an intentional overdose at Hanlan’s Point, Toronto Islands. Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Pflug was sent alone to live with family friends in the Austrian Tyrol town of Kitzbühl where she remained until her early teens. In 1953, Pflug left Germany for Paris to study fashion design. On a train to Paris in 1954, she met Michael Pflug (1929-,) a German medical student and aspiring artist. At his urging, and with the encouragement of artist friends Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenès, Christiane, who had no formal art training, began to paint. The Pflugs married in 1956 and moved shortly afterwards to Tunis, Africa where Michael had accepted a medical internship. In early 1958, Christiane and Michael held the first joint exhibition of their work at l’Alliance Française in Tunis. Christiane and the couple’s two young daughters, Esther and Ursula, joined her mother in Toronto in 1959 while Michael remained in Africa. In 1960, after completing his medical studies in France, Michael joined his family in Canada and soon began medical practice. The Pflugs settled in North Toronto, where Christiane painted her immediate surroundings including several series of city landscapes from her window, a series of interiors with dolls, and larger portraits of her daughters and her art dealer, Avrom Isaacs. In late 1962 Christiane held her first solo exhibition at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto and was represented there until 1967, at which point Michael assumed all management of her work. She was the recipient of Canada Council grants and participated in several major national shows, winning the purchase prize at the 1964 Winnipeg Biennial. Despite her lack of formal training, she taught briefly at the Ontario College of Art in 1969. Christiane Pflug’s work is represented in several Canadian public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, as well as in
Canadian corporate collections and private collections in Europe and North America. She died, committing suicide, on the Toronto Islands in April 1972.

John Henry Pollock (1930–1992), known primarily as Jack Pollock, was a Canadian art dealer, painter, art instructor, author and owner/director of the Pollock Gallery in Toronto. Born in Toronto, he attended the Ontario College of Art there and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, England. He opened the Pollock Gallery in Toronto in 1960. In 1962, Jack Pollock met Anishinaabe painter and printmaker Norval Morrisseau while teaching in northern Ontario. Shortly after, he mounted an exhibition (1962) of the artist’s work at the Pollock Gallery, which continued to represent Morrisseau for several years. In 1979, Jack Pollock collaborated with author and broadcaster Lister Sinclair (1921–2006) on the illustrated publication The art of Norval Morrisseau (Toronto: Methuen, 1979). Pollock also wrote We all are all (Toronto, 1980), a privately-published book of poetry illustrated with his own drawings; Dear M (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), a memoir in letters written to his psychiatrist between 1984 and 1987; and several exhibition catalogues. After he became chronically ill, the Pollock Gallery closed in 1981. In 1984 he moved to Gordes in the south of France. Jack Pollock died in Toronto in 1992. Paintings, prints and drawings by Jack Pollock are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ont.) and other public art museums in Canada.