Series LA.SC150.S2 - Sketchbook

Frances Loring (1887-1968) and Florence Wyle (1881-1968) were Canadian sculptors. Frances Loring was born in Wardner, Idaho. She studied art in Europe as well as Chicago, Boston, and New York. Florence Wyle was born in Trenton, Illinois, and studied medicine at the University of Illinois and then art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she later taught classes. She then worked in New York where she shared a studio with Frances Loring. Loring and Wyle moved to Toronto in 1912, and in 1920 bought an old church and converted it into a studio. Loring and Wyle were both active in Canadian art movements and were founding members of the Sculptors Society of Canada in 1928. Their work can be seen at the National Gallery in Ottawa, Art Gallery of Toronto, and in the streets of Toronto on such buildings as the Toronto General Hospital and Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, and on memorials in small towns in Ontario, New Brunswick and Maine.

(Marie) Illy Gepe (1903-) was a ceramic artist born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the area that later became Czechoslovakia. She and her husband, Herbert Gepe, immigrated to Canada in 1935. Illy Gepe was an honourary member of the Women’s Art Association of Canada in Toronto, offering pottery classes there in 1952, and a friend of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring’s.