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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.

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.

Beth (Mary Elizabeth) Southcott, née Woolger, 1923-2004, was an amateur artist and art writer based in the Clarkson area of Mississauga. She was interested in visual art throughout her life, taking courses as a child at the (then) Art Gallery of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art, and later serving as the director of Visual Arts Mississauga. Southcott became interested in Indigenous art as an outcome of a course she took at Erindale College (now University of Toronto Mississauga) in 1975. Her book The Sound of the Drum is an original contribution to the historiography of Anishinaabe art and its reception by settler audiences.

Tess Boudreau Taconis (1919-2007) was a photographer known for her portraits of Canadian artists in the 1960s. Born Mary Theresa Boudreau in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, she grew up in southwestern Ontario. A skilled darkroom technician, she was working in Paris when in 1950 she met and married Kryn Taconis, a photojournalist born in the Netherlands. The couple moved to Amsterdam and then to Canada in 1959, settling in Toronto. Tess Taconis photographed contemporary artists, particularly those associated with the Isaacs Gallery, such as Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow, William Ronald and Graham Coughtry. Tess Boudreau Taconis died in Guelph, Ontario in 2007. Her work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, among other institutions.

Walter Trier (Prague, 1890-Collingwood, Ontario, 1951) was a caricaturist and illustrator of children's books.