J.A. Wainwright (1946- ) is a writer of poetry, fiction and non-fiction; and an emeritus Professor of English at Dalhousie University. He published Blazing Figures: A Life of Robert Markle (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press) in 2010.
Angela Nairne Grigor is a writer and art educator living in Picton, Ontario. Born in Britain, she attended the Wimbledon School of Art and the Brighton College of Art. She became a Canadian citizen in 1974 and received her MA and PhD from Concordia University in 1982 and 1985, respectively. She worked as a travelling art specialist for five years in England, and taught in Canadian high schools and at Concordia University. She has also exhibited her own drawings, soft sculptures and textiles. She began her research on Arthur Lismer’s teaching career in the 1980’s, and her book, Arthur Lismer, visionary art educator, was published by the McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2002. In that year she was awarded the Prix des Fondateurs de L’Association Canadienne de Histoire de l’Education for the best work in English.
Christine Boyanoski (1955-) is a Canadian art historian and curator who was on the staff of the Art Gallery of Ontario in the 1980s and 1990s.
Marjorie Lismer Bridges (1913-2006), who lived most of her life in Ashton, Maryland, devoted a number of years to organizing her father’s archival records after his death, gradually donating them to public repositories. Her book on her father’s drawings, A Border of Beauty: Arthur Lismer’s Pen and Pencil (Toronto: Red Rock), was published in 1977. She also wrote the “Arthur Lismer source book,” included in the Arthur Lismer and Marjorie Lismer Bridges fonds.
Buchanan, Donald W. (Donald William)
Donald William Buchanan (1908-1966) was a Canadian author, art historian/critic and arts administrator. Born in Lethbridge, Alberta, he was the son of Senator W.A. Buchanan, publisher of the Lethbridge Herald. Donald Buchanan studied modern history at the University of Toronto and held a fellowship at Oxford University. In 1935, he founded the National Film Society of Canada (from 1950 The Canadian Film Institute). The following year, his biography of James Wilson Morrice was published in Toronto. Subsequently, he worked at the CBC (1937-40), Canadian Art Magazine (1942, as co-editor) and the National Film Board (1944-46), where he established the stills division. He was at the National Gallery of Canada from 1947 to 1960 and there founded the National Design Centre, eventually becoming Associate Director (1956-60) and afterward (1963) a trustee. In addition to the Morrice biography, Donald Buchanan wrote Educational and Cultural Films in Canada (1936), This Is Canada (1944), Canadian Painters from Paul Kane to the Group of Seven (1945), Design for Use (1947), The Growth of Canadian Painting (1950), Alfred Pellan (1962) and To Have Seen the Sky (1962). After leaving the National Gallery, he began a career as an artist/photographer; his work was exhibited successfully and appeared in published photo-essays. On his death in a car crash in Ottawa in 1966 his collection of artworks was bequeathed to the art gallery in Lethbridge.
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.
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.
Melvin Ormond Hammond (1876–1934) was a Canadian journalist, editor, photographer and author. He was born in Clarkson, Ont. to Alvin and Catharine (Nauman) Hammond, and attended local public schools. In 1895 he became a reporter in Toronto with The Globe newspaper, where he continued in various positions for his entire career. In 1900 he married Clara Williams (b. 1875), with whom he had two children, Harold James (b. 1901) and Helen Isabel (b. 1909).
Melvin Hammond joined the Toronto Camera Club in 1906 and took up photography, the pursuit for which he is today best known, exhibiting his amateur photos at the Canadian National Exhibition and elsewhere in Toronto. His journalistic interest in Canada resulted in photographs of Canadian monuments and memorials and in portrait photographs of prominent figures of the day. As an author, he wrote three books, the last of which was Painting and Sculpture in Canada (Toronto : Ryerson Press, 1930).
M.O. Hammond was also a member of the Canadian Literary Club, the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, the Ontario Historical Society, and the Canadian Historical Society. He died in Toronto in 1934.
Leslie Mezei (born 1931 in Budapest, Hungary) is a former computer scientist who did pioneering work in the theory and practice of computer art and graphics while he was a professor at the University of Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s. His computer art experiments and writings thereon are among the earliest explorations of the medium. In 1972, Mezei completed the manuscript of a book, Computer Art: An International Portfolio, containing a history and overview of the medium illustrated with reproductions of early computer artwork from around the world.
Edmund Montague Morris (1871-1913) was a Canadian portraitist, landscape painter and author. Born in Perth, Ontario, he studied in Toronto privately as well as at Toronto Art Students’ League 1889-91, and in New York at the Art Students’ League, 1891-92. Between 1893 and 1896 Morris was a student at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He returned to Toronto in 1896 to set up a studio and became involved in art societies, including the Royal Canadian Academy (ARCA [associate] 1898), the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto. A founding member of the Canadian Art Club in 1907, he was its secretary for several years. He was on the council of the Art Museum of Toronto—now the Art Gallery of Ontario—from 1909. Beginning in 1906 Morris produced the works for which he is chiefly known, portraits in pastels of Canadian aboriginal leaders. Many of these, executed during extensive travel in the Canadian West, were done on commission from the governments of Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan to be hung in provincial legislature buildings. Morris also painted landscapes, especially of scenes along the St Lawrence River in Quebec. It was while working at Portneuf near Quebec City that he drowned in August 1913. He is buried in Toronto. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and other galleries, especially in Western Canada.