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David Phillips Silcox (1937- ) is a Canadian art historian and arts administrator. He has held positions at the Canada Council, York University in Toronto, federal and Ontario culture ministries, the University of Toronto and other academic and cultural institutions. From 2001 to 2013 he was president of Sotheby’s Canada. David Silcox has written books on Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. His biography of Canadian artist David Brown Milne, Painting Place: the life and work of David B. Milne, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1996. He is also co-author with David Milne Jr of the catalogue raisonné of Milne’s paintings, for which the David Milne Project was instituted. David Silcox was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2006.

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.

Johan Wilhelm (Billy) Klüver (1927-2004) was an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories who founded Experiments in Art and Technology.

Sybille Oltea Yvonne Pantazzi (1914-1983) was the Librarian at the Art Gallery of Ontario for thirty-two years, a book-collector and a pioneering scholar in the area of Victorian book design. She was born in Romania, traveled widely as a young woman, and settled in Toronto at the end of the Second World War. Among her many interests were book jackets and the artists who created them.

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

Newton McFaul MacTavish (1875-1941) was a Canadian journalist, art critic and early art historian. Born in Staffa, Ontario, he became a reporter at The Toronto Globe in 1896 and was its assistant financial editor until 1900. From then until 1906, he studied English literature at McGill University while working as a correspondent and business representative of The Globe in Montreal. In 1903 he married Kate Johnson. Between 1906 and 1926, MacTavish was the editor of The Canadian Magazine in Toronto. In 1910 he travelled to Europe and visited the Canadian artists J.W. Morrice and John Wentworth Russell in Paris. He subsequently (1922-1933) served as a trustee of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia conferred honorary degrees on Newton MacTavish in 1924 (M.A.) and 1928 (D. Litt.). From 1926 to 1932 he was a member of the Civil Service Commission of Canada. A founder of the Arts and Letters Club (Toronto), he was also on the editorial advisory board of and contributor to the Encyclopedia of Canada (1932-1935). In addition to his articles, essays and short stories, MacTavish was the author of Thrown In (1923), The Fine Arts in Canada (1925, the first full-length history of Canadian art), and Ars Longa (1938). A fourth work, Newton MacTavish’s Canada, was published posthumously in 1963. He died in Toronto in 1941.

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.

Frederick Sproston Challener, painter, was born in Whetstone, England in 1869 and came to Canada in 1870. He studied at the Ontario School of Art, was first exhibited in 1900 at the Royal Canadian Academy and subsequently worked as a newspaper artist. After a tour of Europe and the Middle East in 1898-99, he began working as a muralist and participated in the decoration of the recently completed Toronto City Hall. At the end of the First World War, Challener worked as a painter for the Canadian War Records Department. He made his career chiefly by creating murals for passenger boats, restaurants, hotels—such as Fort Rouillé in the King Edward Hotel,Toronto—office buildings and theatres, including the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. He also produced easel paintings, watercolours and drawings in a realistic, romantic style. From 1927-1952 he taught at the Ontario College of Art, during which period he made notes and assembled material on Canadian artists. He died in Toronto in 1959. Challener was a member of numerous arts organizations including the Toronto Art Students’ League, Ontario Society of Artists, Royal Canadian Academy, Society of Mural Decorators of Toronto and the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto (founding member, 1908). His work is in the National Gallery of Canada, the Civic Art Gallery, Winnipeg, the Art Gallery of Ontario and numerous public buildings.