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Carl Fellman Schaefer (1903-1995) was a Canadian artist and educator known for his depictions of rural Ontario. John(Jack) Martin (1904-1965) was a British-born Canadian artist, designer and educator. The two, who were friends and colleagues, exchanged letters in illustrated envelopes from circa 1954 until Martin’s death.

John(Jack) Martin (1904-1965) was a British-born Canadian artist, designer and educator.

Anna Belle Wing Kindlund (later Mrs. Alois Trnka), 1876-1922, was an artist born in Buffalo, New York. She studied with W. Hitchcock in Buffalo, and G. Bridgman in New York. She was a member of the Buffalo Society of Artists and the New York Society of Craftsmen, and is listed in Who Was Who in American Art as a painter and miniaturist.

Douglas Moerdyke Duncan (1902-1968) was a Canadian art collector and dealer, book collector and director of the Picture Loan Society in Toronto. He was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and studied at the University of Toronto. From 1925 to 1928 he trained as a bookbinder of fine books in Paris, then returned to Toronto to open a studio. In 1936 he was a member of the founding committee of the Picture Loan Society and soon after its director. Over the next thirty years, his taste in selecting work for inclusion in the society’s frequent exhibitions became increasingly influential. With his private income Duncan supported artists by purchasing their work, eventually amassing an important collection of Canadian art. After his death in Toronto in 1968, the collection was dispersed to public galleries across Canada, including over 600 works to the National Gallery in Ottawa.

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.

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.