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George Agnew Reid (1860-1947) was a Canadian artist, architect, educator and administrator influential in the early 20th century and instrumental in the formation of a number of important Canadian art institutions. Born in Wingham Ontario to a Scottish farm family, he studied architecture and book-keeping at his father’s insistence. In 1878 he moved to Toronto to study art. He was able to extend his art education under Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia, where he met the painter Mary Heister. In 1888 the couple travelled to Europe and studied at the Julian and Colorossi Academies, returning to Toronto in 1889. The house he designed and built in Wychwood Park was his home until the end of his life. In 1890, George Reid began reaching at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design. He eventually became principal and researched new theories of art education in the United States and Europe. Under his direction, the art school became independent of the Board of Education and moved into its own building, which he designed, in 1921. He also served as its first Principal. In 1892, George and Mary Reid built two cottages from his design at the artist colony in Onteora, New York. This led to the design of other summer homes and a small church in the Catskills community. They spent summers at this location until 1917 when the war made travel to the United States difficult. In 1921 Mary Heister Reid died, and in 1923 George Reid married Mary Wrinch, a former student and close friend of his first wife. His later life was filled with accomplishments, including the painting of murals for public spaces in Toronto City Hall, Jarvis Collegiate, the Royal Ontario Museum and elsewhere. He was instrumental in obtaining permanent funding and staff for the National Gallery in Ottawa, and was a force behind the establishment of the Art Gallery of Toronto. He was a member of the RCA, serving as President 1906-1907. He influenced a generation of students, among them C.W. Jefferys, through his teaching and created a number of works that exemplify his generation, including Forbidden Fruit, Mortgaging the Homestead, and The Foreclosure of the Mortgage.

Joseph Loxton Rawbon (1855-1942) was an artist and art restorer active in Toronto in the 1920s. He was born in Cape Town, moved to England ca. 1861, and emigrated to Canada in 1871. Rawbon began his career as a gun maker in his father’s employment, but turned later to art and photography. He won prizes for his work at several fairs in southern Ontario. Rawbon claimed to have invented the keyless stretcher for artists’ canvases, and developed his own “Rawbon Process” to clean the varnish from paintings. He served as a lifeguard as a member of the Queen City Life-Saving Association.

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.

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.

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).

Jessie Oonark (1906-1985) was a Canadian Inuit artist, known primarily for her prints and textile works.

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.