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David Brown Milne (Burgoyne, Ontario 1882-Bancroft, Ontario 1953) was a painter and etcher; he is widely considered to be among the most outstanding Canadian artists. He worked as a schoolteacher before deciding to study painting in New York where, in 1903, he enrolled in the Art Students’ League. Milne supported himself through commercial artwork but actively and successfully developed his own painting, exhibiting five canvases in the famous Armory Show of 1913. His friends during this period included James (“René”) Clarke, with whom he maintained a correspondence for many years. In 1916, Milne and his wife Patsy (née May Frances Hagerty), whom he had married in 1912, left the city and settled in Boston Corners, New York. In late 1917 Milne joined the Canadian army as a private, and in 1918 was appointed as a war artist to record the locations of battles that had involved Canadian troops. Milne returned to Boston Corners in 1919, where he spent most of his winters until 1928, summering in the Adirondacks. He moved to Ottawa for one year in 1923, when the National Gallery of Canada bought six of his watercolours. In 1928, Milne moved permanently back to Ontario (he separated from his wife in 1933), spending extended periods of time alone in the wilderness regions north of Toronto. Palgrave, a short drive from Toronto, became Milne’s home from 1930 to 1933, and from 1933 to 1939 he lived in a cabin on Six Mile Lake near Georgian Bay. He maintained an interest in the Toronto art scene and developed a small group of patrons including Alice and Vincent Massey, and Douglas Duncan of the Picture Loan Society, who acted as Milne’s agent and dealer for many years. He met his second wife Kathleen Pavey in 1938 and lived with her from 1939; their only child David Jr. was born in 1941. The Milnes lived in Uxbridge from 1940 to 1946. From 1947 Milne lived and worked at Baptiste Lake, with Kathleen and David Jr. joining him periodically. As Milne’s health deteriorated, the family moved to Bancroft to be closer to Baptiste Lake. Milne died at Bancroft in December 1953. His work is represented in numerous public collections, notably the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

James Wilson Morrice (1865-1924) was a Canadian painter. He was born in Montreal and studied at the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall law school. Although he was called to the Ontario Bar in 1889, he never practised law. Instead, he went to France in 1890 and studied art in Paris at the Académie Julian and with painters Henri Harpignies and James McNeill Whistler. Morrice returned to Canada often to visit and became a member of the Canadian Art Club in Toronto around 1907. On several of those occasions, he painted scenes of Quebec City and the surrounding countryside—his chief Canadian works. Among Canadian painters of the day, Curtis Williamson, Maurice Cullen and William Brymner were colleagues and friends. He travelled extensively in Europe but lived for the most part in Paris, exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne and associating with artists like Henri Matisse and Robert Henri and writers such as Arnold Bennett and Somerset Maugham. His trips to North Africa and the Caribbean produced some of his most colourful canvases. Morrice is generally considered the earliest Canadian painter to achieve an international reputation. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery in Ottawa and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, as well as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Tate Gallery, London. He died in Tunis in 1924.

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.

Jean-Baptiste Norman Henry Morrisseau (1931–2007), known primarily as Norval Morrisseau, was a Canadian Anishinaabe painter and printmaker who signed his work with his Ojibwa name “Copper Thunderbird.” A self-taught artist, he was born at Sand Point reserve near Beardmore, Ont. At the age of six, he was sent to a Roman Catholic residential school for two years, after which he attended a local community school. In 1957, he married Harriet Kakegamic (1935–1995) with whom he had several children. They lived in the Red Lake area and elsewhere in northwestern Ontario. In later years, the artist stayed in Nanaimo, B.C.
In a manner known as the Woodland Style he is known for initiating, Norval Morrisseau painted in thick black outlines and bright colours, basing his images on Anishinaabe cultural sources and Christian symbols. Several of his earliest solo exhibitions were held at the Pollock Gallery, with which he was associated until the gallery closed in 1981. In 1978, Norval Morrisseau was made a member of the Order of Canada. He was also a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Professional National Indian Artists Incorporation (“Indian Group of Seven”). He retired from painting in 2002.
Norval Morrisseau died in Toronto in 2007. His works are in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ont.), the McMichael Canadian Collection and other public art museums in Canada.

Joan Murray (1943-) is an art historian, curator, author and museum administrator known for her work at art museums including the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

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.

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.

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.