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Gertrude Eleanor Spurr Cutts (1858-1941) was a British Canadian artist and paintings restorer. Born in Scarborough, England, Gertrude Spurr attended the Scarborough School of Art, and the Lambeth School of Art, London. She immigrated to Toronto in 1890 and continued to paint, joining the Toronto Art Students’ League in 1896. In 1909 she married fellow artist William Malcolm Cutts (1857-1943) and travelled with him to St. Ives (Cornwall), England, where they stayed for three years. They then lived in Toronto from 1912 to 1915 before settling finally in Port Perry, Ont., where she died at the age of 83. Gertrude Spurr Cutts is believed to have worked as a restorer in the 1920s and 1930s.

Charles Wyatt Eaton (1849-1896) was a Canadian painter, illustrator, author and teacher who spent much of his life in the United States. Born in Philipsburg, Canada East (now Quebec), he left to study in New York at the National Academy of Design around 1867 and subsequently (1872) in France at the École des beaux-arts in Paris. There, he was influenced by Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon painters. Returning to Philipsburg in 1876, Eaton began painting portraits locally and in Montreal. From 1877 to 1882 he taught drawing and portraiture at the Cooper Union in New York and helped found the Society of American Artists, of which he was president in 1883. He married Charlotte Collins of New York in 1887. During and after this period he produced portraits of American authors and poets (notably pen-and-ink drawings for Century Magazine) and prominent Canadians along with well-received genre pictures of the Quebec countryside in the manner of Millet. In 1895 he went to Italy to recover from illness and surgery. He returned to the United States the following year and died in Newport or Middletown, Rhode Island. He is buried in Philipsburg.

(Marie) Illy Gepe (1903-) was a ceramic artist born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the area that later became Czechoslovakia. She and her husband, Herbert Gepe, immigrated to Canada in 1935. Illy Gepe was an honourary member of the Women’s Art Association of Canada in Toronto, offering pottery classes there in 1952, and a friend of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring’s.

Gallery Moos was opened by Walter Moos in May 1959 at the corner of Avenue Road and Davenport Road in Toronto. Early in 1963 it moved to Yorkville Avenue, becoming one of the first arrivals in what was to become a significant gallery district of the city, and subsequently prospered there for some 30 years. In July 1992 the gallery moved to 622 Richmond Street West.

Susan Feindel is the author of the Catalogue Raisonné of the Art Work of Helen Galloway McNicoll (1879-1915).

Murray Favro (1940- ) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, sculptor, and musician based in London, Ontario. He is known for his multimedia installations and his work with the Nihilist Spasm Band, of which he is a founding member.

Favro was born in Huntsville, Ontario where he lived until moving to London, Ontario in 1957 with his mother. Here he attended the H.B. Beal Technical and Commercial School (1958-62), where he studied art and became acquainted with a number of other artists in the area. In 1968 Favro married Judith Bryon, and their son, Mark, was born in 1969. After receiving a Canada Council Arts Bursary in 1970 he was able to leave a job as a commercial artist at a printing company and begin working on creating and exhibiting his art full time.

Throughout his career Favro has worked with a diverse range of materials and mediums, including paint, sculpture, projections, film, instruments, and machinery, although he is perhaps best known for his projected reconstructions and technical objects, which cross the borders between art and invention. Much of his work reflects a strong interest in perspective, the relationships between art and science, and technology, and is known to challenge traditional categorization. Two major retrospective exhibitions of Favro’s work have been held to date, the first by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1983 and the second by the London Regional Art and Historical Museums and the McIntosh Gallery in 1998.

In addition to his artistic career, Favro is the guitarist for the Nihilist Spasm Band, which he founded alongside John Boyle, John Clement, Greg Curnoe, Bill Exley, Art Pratten, Archie Leitch, and Hugh McIntyre in 1965. Favro has described his work with the band as influential and parallel to his work as an artist, noting the band’s lack of hierarchy and their music’s lack of structure as intentional and significant. The instruments he plays as guitarist for the band are of his own creation, as are a number of the instruments played by other members of the band. They have performed shows across Canada and internationally, including an appearance at the Paris Biennale in the 1970s and at least two Japan tours in 1996 and 1999.

Throughout his career Favro has given artist talks and lectures at institutions across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, and taught classes at the Ontario College of Art in the 1970s. Together with a number of other artists who were active in London in the 1960s and 70s, such as Jack Chambers and Tony Urquhart, he was involved with some of the first artist-run galleries in Canada, namely the 2020 Gallery, which existed from 1966-1970 and the Forest City Gallery, founded in 1973.

Favro’s work is held and has been exhibited by many major art institutions and private collections across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Fine Arts Museum. He has been represented variously by the Carmen Lamanna Gallery and the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto. Favro received the Gerhson Iskowitz Award in 1997 and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2007.

The Fairlies were a prominent Canadian family who lived and worked throughout Ontario during the first half of the twentieth century.

Reverend John Fairlie (1844-1919) and his wife Hannah Waldrup Fraser (ca. 1847-1929) came from Scotland to Quebec in 1873, then to Kingston in 1900. They had nine children—four girls and five boys. One of their sons, Matthew Fraser Fairlie (ca. 1883-1944), attended Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. He graduated in 1902 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mining Engineering and moved to Cobalt, Ontario with his wife, Anne Louise Fitzpatrick (ca. 1881-1961) to work for Kerr-Addison Gold Mines Ltd. during the Silver Rush of 1903. They moved to Toronto in the late 1920s, purchased a house in Forest Hill, and adopted two children: Alan Fraser Fairlie (1927-2001) and Joyce Fairlie (1929-1956). Alan attended both Crescent School and Upper Canada College (ca. 1935-1948), two prestigious all-boys private schools in Toronto. Joyce attended Bishop Strachan School for girls (ca. 1935-?).

After attending the University of Toronto for Radio Broadcasting (1949-?), Alan F. Fairlie started a film company, Monarch Productions Ltd. He was commissioned to produce films for the Canadian Rugby team in Bermuda, the development of Giant’s Tomb in Penetang, Ontario, and various programs for CTV Television Network. He also shot and produced his own films documenting archaeological caves in Yucatan, his travels to Mexico, and footage in various countries throughout Europe. Alan married Snezana Susanne Popovich in 1962. They had two children: LuAnne Fairlie (1963- ) and Matthew Peter Fairlie (1966- ). Alan retired to Salt Spring Island, British Columbia where he lived until his death in 2001.

W.H. Graham is the author of The Tiger of Canada West (Clarke Irwin & Co., 1962) and Greenbank: Country Matters in 19th Century Ontario (University of Toronto Press, 1990). In the 1970s, he researched and wrote a stage documentary on the life of Tom Thomson.