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Robert (Bob) Elstone was an active member of the Burlington, Ontario community. His obituary reads: “… Bob was a man of vision and courage who wore many hats with a passion. Not only was he a WWII veteran (First Mate in the Merchant Navy), but an ambitious agriculturalist, naturalist, historian, entrepreneur, volunteer, world traveller, map enthusiast, master mariner, and master swimmer. He was the proud proprietor of Elstone Stationery for almost fifty years which was the hub of the community. His goal was to help and serve people. He was known as “Mr. Rotary” and during his years of service he has been involved in the formation of nine Rotary clubs including two in Egypt; as well as the past president of Burlington Central. Bob was the co-founder of the Burlington Rotary Fall Music Festival. He has been honoured twice with the Paul Harris fellowship, Rotary’s highest honour. He was instrumental, along with others, in establishing the Burlington YMCA., He received the first achievement award in 1976. For 36 years he had a teen program on Saturday nights at the YMCA and over one hundred teen weekend camps over the years. Bob was honoured as citizen of the year for Burlington in 1997. He was also the chairman of the Burlington Beautification Committee and Chairman of the Burlington Uniform Hours Association. He was an Honorary Life member of Hamilton-Burlington YMCA, Burlington Historical Society, Hamilton Naturalist Club and West Flamborough Heritage Society….”

Jacob Cooke was born in England in 1908 and emigrated to Canada in 1927, eventually settling in Burlington, Ontario. He worked as a carpenter’s helper for Pigott Construction (based in Hamilton, Ontario), and later specialized in the laying of hardwood floors. In 1935, he purchased a hand operated block making machine and began manufacturing concrete blocks in the evenings in a shed at the back of his home at 3 New Street (now 2109 New Street). The blocks were to be used as bases for Christmas trees that decorated Brant Street that Christmas season.

In 1937, he installed his first power-operated block machine. He purchased sand and gravel from Frank Scheer on St. Matthew’s Avenue. The demand for concrete blocks continued, so what had begun as a small cottage industry expanded to larger premises on St. Matthew’s Avenue in Aldershot, on lands purchased from George Filman. An adjacent 55 acre gravel pit provided the raw materials needed for the rapidly expanding operation.

Jacob Cooke purchased property in Aldershot, Oakville and Hamilton. He and employee Brant Coleman developed these properties and sold them to builders. In 1952, they developed the Glen Acres survey (Birdland) on the Filman property. The streets were named after birds in honour of William Filman, who used to have a bird sanctuary on the property. As the business expanded, Jacob Cooke purchased Joe DeLuca’s farm which became the site of the Cooke Business Park at 35 Plains Road E.

By 1953, J. Cooke Concrete Blocks was the largest producer of concrete blocks in Canada, each day producing enough to build 30 houses. The company was in operation around the clock and produced ten million eight-inch blocks per year. Jacob Cooke, retaining the land development company, sold the concrete block business in 1958. His son William (Bill) stayed on to manage the company with his brother Eugene Barrymore (Barry) as Plant Manager. The company was sold again in 1977 and 1998.

At the age of 62, Jacob Cooke visited family in Australia and decided to pursue opportunities there. Convincing his son Barry to join him, Jacob purchased, cleared and planted thousands of acres of land. Jacob Cooke died in Australia on 6 November 1976.

William Jacob Cooke (Bill) was born on Maple Avenue in Burlington on 1 June 1931. He and his brother Eugene Barrymore (Barry) attended Maplehurst Public School and Waterdown High School. Bill married Mary Elizabeth Gray (Bette) on 19 February 1955. Bill carried on the concrete block business after his father and brother moved to Australia, and also became involved with land development.

Some of the areas developed in Aldershot by the Cooke family are Birdland, Harbour Heights, Oaklands Estates, Fairwood Place West, and the Cooke Business Park adjacent to the former concrete block plant. The Cooke family developed over 800 residential lots in the Aldershot area. The property now known as Oaklands Estates on Burlington Bay was purchased by Jacob Cooke in the early 1950s and was later developed into a residential street by Bill. Bill lived at 160 Oaklands Park Court, the home he built there in 1959. In the Fairwood Acres survey on North Shore Boulevard, Bill named the streets after his children: Daryl, David, Lynn and Lee. Bill’s wife Mary died in 2000; he later married Louise Oates. He died in Burlington on 12 May 2005 at the age of 74.

George Blair (1852-1935) was a prominent member of the Burlington, Ontario community as a builder and fruit farmer, an elder and treasurer of Knox Presbyterian Church and a municipal councillor. He also served several terms on both the public and high school boards and was also a member of the Fruit Growers Association. Many of the houses that Blair built are still standing and several of them have plaques from the Burlington Heritage Committee. Blair was born at Harper's Corners, Ontario and as an adult, lived and worked as a carpenter in Kilbride. In 1886, he built a home for his first wife, Lorentia (nee Parkin) and their family at 472 Burlington Avenue, Burlington. In 1893, the now-widowed Blair married Hannah Smith (nee Shepherd), who was also widowed. George Blair feared the effect of city living on their sons and so bought a 50-acre fruit farm on Brant Street. Though rural in character, it was still within the boundaries of the Town of Burlington. Together, the couple raised their several children: George's two sons H. Melvin and Ferguson G., and daughter, Mary Grace, Hannah's two sons, Henry Melvin Smith and Edward (Ted) Shepherd Smith, as well as the couple's sons George Stanley and John Nicoll, and daughters Eva Marion and Mabel Beatrice.

The Burlington Spectator was published as a section of the Hamilton Spectator [Ontario, Canada] between 8 September 1986 and February 1988. Its launch on 8 September 1986 followed the takeover and closing of the Burlington Gazette which had been published since 1896. Originally published six days a week, the Burlington section began to appear less frequently. Its office at 534 Brant Street was closed in 1988 and remaining staff moved to the Spectator offices in Hamilton.

The Arts and Letters Club of Burlington, Ontario was formed in 1948 by a small group of dedicated women as an out-growth of the Roseland Book Club. Its purpose was to develop interest in literature and the arts, through the circulation of books, lectures on literary topics, art, music, films and drama. The early meetings were held in the Lion’s Club Hall, later in Trefoil Lodge, and then in the Burlington Central Library.

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.

A.H. Howard (fl. 1889-1904) was an artist and member of the Toronto Art League.

Mercer Union was created by former members of A.C.T. in 1979 to operate as an artist-run, non-profit cooperative gallery. Twelve founders contributed financially to the rental of a ground floor space at 29 Mercer Street and planned to mix local, regional, national and international exhibits, collaborating with other artist-run programs. Its mandate was to exhibit new work in the most advanced forms of painting and sculpture that was not receiving exposure in the commercial and public galleries. Performance art, installations and music were incorporated into the programming, which has continued to represent innovative and sometimes controversial material. Twelve board members are elected by dues-paying members and serve on the various committees (programming, curatorial, etc), with the help of a small paid staff. The gallery moved to 333 Adelaide Street West, 5th floor in 1981 and 439 King Street West in 1994. Their present location is 37 Lisgar Street; current information about the gallery can be obtained at www.mercerunion.org.

Henry Sandham (1842-1910) was an illustrator and painter who lived successively in Montreal, Boston, and London, England. He was associated with the Montreal studio of William Notman, where he received his early training, later headed the art department, and was briefly a partner. Sandham produced illustrations for several leading magazines of his day, including the Century Magazine.

John Hamilton Bush (1909–1977), primarily known as Jack Bush, was a Canadian painter best known for his Abstract Expressionist style. Born in Toronto, he lived in London, Ont. and Montreal during his early years. Jack Bush began his career in advertising, working in his father’s firm, Rapid Electro Type Company in Montreal. During this time, he studied at the Art Association of Montreal with Edmund Dyonnet and Adam Sherriff Scott. In 1928, he transferred to the company’s office in Toronto, where he took evening classes under Frederick Challener, John Alfsen and Charles Comfort at the Ontario College of Art. Bush’s early work as a painter was influenced by Comfort and the Group of Seven, and throughout the 1930s and ‘40s he produced largely landscape and figurative paintings. His first exhibition was with the Ontario Society of Artists in Toronto in 1936.
In 1934, Jack Bush married Mabel Mills Teakle, a family friend from Montreal, and together they had three sons, Jack Jr (b. 1936), Robert (b. 1938) and Terry (b. 1942). In 1953, dissatisfied with Canada’s place in the international contemporary art scene, Bush and several other Toronto abstract artists founded the group Painters Eleven. William Ronald, another member of Painters Eleven, and an artist who had worked in New York, introduced U.S. art critic Clement Greenberg to the group, which led to a lasting friendship between Bush and Greenberg. The contact with Greenberg in 1957 led to Bush’s international breakthrough in the early 1960s, beginning with his 1962 exhibition at the Robert Elkon Gallery in New York. Between the late 1950s and mid ‘60s, Bush painted in loose brushstrokes with diluted oils, staining paint onto unprimed canvas. In 1966, concerned by the health hazards associated with oil-based paints, he switched to water-based acrylics, less textured than oils but more brightly coloured.
In 1964, Jack Bush’s work was included in Greenberg’s Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum, an exhibition that travelled to Minneapolis and Toronto. Along with Jacques Hurtubise, Bush represented Canada at the Bienal de São Paulo (Brazil) in 1967. In the year preceding his death in 1977 (from a heart attack), he received the Order of Canada. That same year, the Art Gallery of Ontario mounted a retrospective exhibition of his abstract works that travelled to several Canadian galleries. Jack Bush’s work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, London’s Tate Gallery and others.

Goldwin Smith (1823-1910) was a prominent journalist, academic and liberal reformer who spent the latter part of his life in Toronto. Born in Reading, England, he was educated at Eton College and Oxford University, and was the Regius Professor of History at Oxford from 1858 to 1866. Smith began to publish widely on history and political reform. He moved to the United States in 1868, and taught briefly at Cornell University, to which he retained a connection for the rest of his life. He moved to Toronto in 1871, and married Harriet Elizabeth Mann (née Dixon) the widow of William Henry Boulton, in 1875. Smith thus became master of the Grange house and estate in central Toronto, and became a pillar of Toronto society. His journalistic career included a brief employment at the Globe, after which he joined independent publishing ventures including the Canadian Monthly and National Review and the Evening Telegram. He then published his own journal, the Bystander, sporadically between 1879 and 1890. Smith also published widely in other local and international news journals. He took part in important civic and educational reform initiatives, including serving on the new board of the University of Toronto. The Grange remained his wife's property and was willed by her to the city of Toronto to serve as a public art gallery, later becoming the first home of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

John Bernard Boyle (1941- ) is an artist, activist, curator and writer who has lived and worked in St. Catharines, London, Elsinore, and Peterborough, Ontario. He married Janet Perlman, with whom he has one daughter, Emily. Boyle was educated at London Teachers’ College and the University of Western Ontario, and is self-taught as a painter. He taught elementary school in St. Catharines intermittently between 1962 and 1968. In 1974 he moved with his family to a converted church in Elsinore, Ontario (near Owen Sound), where he had his studio until 2002. He is currently based in Peterborough. Boyle began to exhibit his paintings in 1964, the same year he was inspired by meeting London artists including Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe. In 1966 controversy arose at the London Public Library and Art Museum over Boyle’s exhibited piece Seated Nude. Boyle was an early participant in London’s 20/20 Gallery. In 1972 he designed sets for the play Buffalo Jump at Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto; that same year he curated the first Billboard Show in St. Catharines. In 1980 Boyle completed the mural Our Knell for Queen Subway Station, Toronto. From 1973 through the 1990s, Boyle exhibited regularly at Nancy Poole’s Studio, Toronto. A key figure among the artist activists who established professional representation and rights for artists in the early 1970s, Boyle was the founding spokesperson of Canadian Artists Representation Ontario (CARO) in 1971. In 1970 he served as the first president of the Niagara Artists Co-operative (later Company). Boyle was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Art Gallery of Ontario, 1975-1977. Boyle has written extensively in journals including 20 Cents Magazine, Parachute, and Twelve Mile Creek. His regular column “According to Boyle” in CAROT (1975-78) dealt with challenges facing artists. Boyle has written three novels, No Angel Came (1995); and the unpublished The Gergovnians and The Peregrinations and Permutations of a Young Artist in Canada. His illustration and book design work includes The Port Dalhousie Stories by Dennis Tourbin (1987), as well as several magazine articles and book jackets. He initiated the discipline of “Canadology” in 1989 to record the social customs of the country. Boyle is a founding member (since 1965) and principal kazooist of The Nihilist Spasm Band. His work is represented in numerous Canadian collections, including the National Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Sir William Cornelius Van Horne (1843-1915), principal builder of the Canadian Pacific Railway and prominent businessman, was an important collector of paintings and Japanese ceramics and an accomplished amateur painter. Born in Illinois, he worked for American railway companies in various capacities until 1882, when he was appointed general manager of Canadian Pacific Railway, the construction of which was completed under his direction. In 1888, Van Horne was elected president of the company, and in 1899, he became president of its board of directors. He retired from active work in the company in 1910. Van Horne incorporated the Cuba Company in 1900 following a visit to that country; under its operations he built and operated a railway, sugar plantations and hotels. In North America, Van Horne was executive or director of more than 40 companies, and was considered one of Canada’s most successful businessmen. William Van Horne married Lucy Adaline, daughter of Erastus Hurd of Galesburg, Illinois, in 1867. They had 3 children: Adaline (1868-1941), William (1871-1876), and Richard Benedict (1877-1931). The family lived principally in Montreal, and also had residences in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, and in Cuba. Van Horne was knighted (KCMG) in 1894. Sir William’s art collection is considered to have been the most prominent pre-First World War collection in Montreal. It contained Old Master and 19th-century European paintings and Japanese ceramics, and also featured ship models and European decorative arts. Van Horne lent regularly to the Montreal Art Association (precursor to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) from 1887 to 1912. His reputation as a collector resulted in his appointment to the consultative committee of the Burlington Magazine in London from 1905 until his death in 1915. Following Sir William’s death, the bulk of his ceramics collection was left to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the art collection passed to the joint ownership of Lady Van Horne and her children Adaline and Richard Benedict, according to terms of Sir William’s will. Lady Van Horne died in 1929. Under the terms of her will, a portion of the art collection went to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the rest was shared among her children. Richard Benedict Van Horne died in 1931. His widow, Edith Molson, had no claim to any share in the remains of the art collection; subsequently she married R. Randolph Bruce. A fire at the Van Horne mansion in 1935 did not damage any paintings. Adaline Van Horne, who had been managing the collection through the 1930s, died unmarried and childless in 1941. Ownership of the collection then passed to Richard Benedict and Edith’s son William C.C. Van Horne (1907–1946) and his wife Margaret (d.1987), familiarly known as “Billie” (née Hannon). When William died, leaving no heir, ownership of the collection remained with his wife. Margaret Van Horne managed the art collection for over forty years, corresponding with art dealers and conservators in order to achieve optimal values for paintings. Numerous paintings were sold in several different auction sales over the course of this time. She continued to live in the Van Horne mansion until 1972. The house was demolished the following year to great protest in the architectural conservation community. When Margaret Van Horne died in 1987, the remainder of the collection passed to her brother Matthew Hannon. Upon Matthew Hannon’s death in 1988, the remainder of the art collection passed to his heirs.

Timothy Melvin Zuck, Canadian artist and educator, was born in 1947 in Erie, Pennsylvania. He attended Wilmington College from 1966-1967 and 1968-1969. There he majored in philosophy and psychology and took a few courses in art history and sculpture. In 1967-1968, Zuck joined his parents on a year-long mission to India, where he studied at Madras Christian College. Zuck received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in 1971. While at NSCAD, he did performance, film, photographic and other process-oriented and conceptual projects. In Halifax Zuck met and married Robyn Randell. He then earned his Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1972. After completing his graduate studies, Zuck returned to NSCAD in late 1972, where he was Assistant Professor until 1979. While teaching at NSCAD, he continued to work on his conceptual projects. In 1975, Zuck began to focus on painting, in which he had no formal training. In 1979, he resigned from NSCAD and began to paint full-time in Purcell’s Cove, near Halifax, Nova Scotia. Zuck became a Canadian citizen in 1983. The Zucks moved from Purcell’s Cove to Kingston, Ontario, where they lived from 1982-1984 and then lived for three years in downtown Toronto, where their daughter, Anna, was born in 1985. They then moved to Midland, Ontario. In addition to taking part in many artist expeditions, Zuck won a poster competition for the XV Olympic Winter Games in 1988 in Calgary, Alberta. He moved to Calgary in 2002 to teach at the Alberta College of Art and Design. Tim Zuck is represented by the Sable-Castelli Gallery in Toronto, Ontario and the Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary, Alberta. His work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Europe, and may be found in the collections of numerous Canadian galleries and museums.

James Stanley McLean (1876-1954), Toronto business executive and art collector, was president of Canada Packers and founder of the J.S. McLean Collection of Canadian art. He was born in Clarke Township, Durham County, Ontario. Having graduated from the University of Toronto in 1896, McLean became an employee of the Harris Abattoir Company in Toronto in 1901, rising to become president in the 1920s. He achieved a merger of his firm with three others in 1927, forming Canada Packers Limited — of which he was president until his death. J.S. McLean was a founder-member of the Art Gallery of Toronto and a member of its executive from 1934 until his death. He was a patron of Canadian art himself and started collecting in 1934. In 1939 he began to buy Canadian artworks of art to hang in the offices and other areas of Canada Packers’ plants across the country. The result was a significant collection amassed at a time when such art was not widely sought after. Among the creators of modern art in Canada, he focused especially on the work of A.Y. Jackson, Carl Schaefer, Paraskeva Clark and David Milne. In 1952 the collection was the subject of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of J.S. McLean. Many of the works lent for this exhibition were subsequently donated to the Art Gallery of Ontario. J.S. McLean died in Toronto in 1954.

Michael James Aleck Snow (1929- ) is a Canadian painter, sculptor, filmmaker, photographer and musician. He was born in Toronto and educated at Upper Canada College and subsequently at the Ontario College of Art (1948-1952). After travels in Europe (1953-54) he worked for Graphic Films in Toronto (1955-56), producing his first independent film, A-Z. His first solo exhibition as a painter was at the Greenwich Gallery in Toronto in 1956. Between 1961 and 1967, mostly while living in New York, Snow produced work in the Pop-art mode based on the silhouette of a young woman, entitled Walking Woman, probably his most widely recognized creation. A series of 11 stainless steel sculptures of the image was created for the Ontario pavilion at Expo 67 and is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. After moving to New York in 1964, he made films regarded as Minimalist, such as New York Ear and Eye Control (1964) and Wavelength (1966-67). Returning to Toronto in 1972, Snow worked mainly on cinematic and photographic projects including ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen. His work is concerned with the nature of media themselves, with perception and with the interrelation of language, sound and meaning. Snow has been the subject of exhibitions and retrospectives in Toronto, Vancouver and Paris.

Greg Curnoe (1936-1992), artist, lived most of his life in London, Ontario. He studied at the Special Art Program at H.B. Beal Secondary in London (1954-1956), the Doon School of Fine Arts (June-October 1956), and the Ontario College of Art (1957-1960). Curnoe married Sheila Thompson in 1965, and the couple had three children, Owen, Galen and Zoe. From Curnoe's early years, his hometown of London became the focus of his life and work, and he attracted much attention to its flourishing art scene. In 1962, he organized the first happening and the first artist-run gallery (the Region Gallery) in Canada. Curnoe played a key role in the founding of the Nihilist Party (1963) and the Nihilist Spasm Band (1965). He began making stamp books in 1962, and has been considered the first maker of artists' books in Canada. He founded the Forest City Gallery in 1973. Curnoe took up competitive cycling in 1971, and it remained a passion and ingredient in his art-making for the rest of his life. Over the course of his career, Curnoe was awarded numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council Grants. From 1964, Curnoe exhibited nationally; in 1969 he represented Canada at the Sao Paolo Bienal in Brazil, and in 1976 at the Venice Biennale. He died in a traffic accident while cycling in 1992. Curnoe was the subject of a National Gallery of Canada retrospective in 1980, and the AGO exhibition Greg Curnoe: Life & Stuff in 2001. His work is to be found in all of Canada’s major public collections, as well as many private and corporate collections.

Gilbert Forrest Bagnani (1900-1985) was a professor of ancient history. He was born in Rome to General Ugo Bagnani and Florence Dewar. He served as a Second Lieutenant of artillery towards the end of World War I. After the War he returned to the University of Rome where he received his doctorate. Instead of entering law as he had planned, he turned to the Italian School of Archaeology in Athens to study antiquities. In 1929 Gilbert married Mary Augusta Stewart Houston (1903-1996) of Toronto, daughter of Stewart Houston (editor of "The Financial Post") and Augusta Robinson (daughter of John Beverley Robinson, Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario, and granddaughter of Sir John Beverley Robinson, Chief Justice and Attorney-General of Upper Canada). Gilbert and Stewart had an apartment in Rome and for seven seasons worked, in the Sahara Desert, with the Royal Archaeological Mission to Egypt. In 1937 they fled fascist Italy and purchased a 200 acre farm and house built around 1845 near Port Hope, Ontario and named it "Vogrie". In 1945 Gilbert was invited to teach ancient history at the University of Toronto and in 1958 became a Professor. He retired from the University of Toronto in 1965. The Bagnanis returned to "Vogrie". In the same year, Gilbert was asked to accept a term-appointment at Trent University. He was honoured with a LL.D. by Trent in 1971 and he continued to teach as a Professor of Ancient History until 1975.

The Canadian Art Club was a Toronto-based exhibiting society active from 1907 to 1915. The club brought together the work of most of the leading Canadian painters and sculptors of the day, largely from Toronto and Montreal but also from abroad, for its annual exhibitions. It was formed by seceding members of the Ontario Society of Artists who rejected what they perceived as that group’s parochialism and low artistic standards. Among the founding artist members were W.E. Atkinson, Archibald Browne, Franklin Brownell, Edmund Morris, Homer Watson (first president of the club) and Curtis Williamson. The artists were soon supported by a considerable number of members who were not artists (referred to as ‘lay members’ in documents). Part of the club’s purpose was to encourage expatriate Canadian artists, such as J. W. Morrice and Clarence Gagnon, to associate with the club and to exhibit in Canada. It succeeded in affording sympathetic reception in Toronto for prominent Quebec artists of the time, like Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté. After the death in 1913 of Edmund Morris, honorary secretary and chief organizer, the club declined amid disputes between members until it ceased to function in 1915. The Canadian Art Club was formally dissolved about 1933.

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.

Frederick Sproston Challener, painter, was born in Whetstone, England in 1869 and came to Canada in 1870. He studied at the Ontario School of Art, was first exhibited in 1900 at the Royal Canadian Academy and subsequently worked as a newspaper artist. After a tour of Europe and the Middle East in 1898-99, he began working as a muralist and participated in the decoration of the recently completed Toronto City Hall. At the end of the First World War, Challener worked as a painter for the Canadian War Records Department. He made his career chiefly by creating murals for passenger boats, restaurants, hotels—such as Fort Rouillé in the King Edward Hotel,Toronto—office buildings and theatres, including the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. He also produced easel paintings, watercolours and drawings in a realistic, romantic style. From 1927-1952 he taught at the Ontario College of Art, during which period he made notes and assembled material on Canadian artists. He died in Toronto in 1959. Challener was a member of numerous arts organizations including the Toronto Art Students’ League, Ontario Society of Artists, Royal Canadian Academy, Society of Mural Decorators of Toronto and the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto (founding member, 1908). His work is in the National Gallery of Canada, the Civic Art Gallery, Winnipeg, the Art Gallery of Ontario and numerous public buildings.

Gershon Iskowitz (1921-1988) was an abstract painter based in Toronto for much of his artistic career. Born in Kielce, Poland, he survived internment in Nazi concentration camps and lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Iskowitz studied art in Munich at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in 1947, soon transferring to private studies with Oskar Kokoschka. He moved to Toronto in 1949. His work developed from wartime imagery to a focus on landscapes (particularly inspired by practice in the Parry Sound area), eventually arriving at his mature abstract expressionist style in 1967. Iskowitz began exhibiting with Gallery Moos in 1964, a relationship which continued throughout his career. He taught at the New School (Toronto) from 1967-1970, and his informal mentoring of artists in Toronto is often noted. Iskowitz, along with Walter Redinger, represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1972. The artist established the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation in 1985, with the mandate of awarding the Gershon Iskowitz Prize to a mature practising artist; since 2007 the Foundation has partnered with the Art Gallery of Ontario to administer the Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO.

The Gershon Iskowitz Foundation was started by artist Gershon Iskowitz in 1985, with the mandate of awarding the Gershon Iskowitz Prize to a mature practising artist; since 2007 the Foundation has partnered with the Art Gallery of Ontario to administer the Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO.

Robert Nelson Markle, Canadian artist, writer, educator and musician, was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1936 and died in Holstein, Ontario in 1990. He began his studies at the Ontario College of Art (OCA) in 1954, but was expelled before graduation. While at OCA, he met Marlene Shuster, a fellow student, whom he married in 1958. The focus of Markle’s work from his early days was the female nude, particularly burlesque dancers, and Marlene became his primary model and muse. In 1962 Markle had his first group exhibition at The Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, becoming one of the “Isaacs Group” of artists. In 1965, Markle paintings shown in the exhibition Eros ’65 at the Dorothy Cameron Gallery were seized on a charge of obscenity, drawing considerable media attention. In the mid-1960s Markle began to write for magazines such as the Toronto Telegram Showcase, Maclean’s, and Toronto Life, publishing widely on topics as diverse as striptease, hockey, childhood Christmases, and Gordon Lightfoot. Markle also worked extensively as an illustrator, contributing images to magazines and literary journals. His work as an educator included terms at The New School of Art (1966-1977) and Arts’ Sake (1977-1982) as well as OCA and the University of Guelph. From the early 1960s, Markle played tenor saxophone and piano in the Artists’ Jazz Band. In 1970 the Markles moved to a farmhouse outside of Holstein, Ontario, although Robert re-established a studio in Toronto from 1979 to 1982. In 1979, he won a commission to decorate a Toronto hamburger restaurant, which was named Markleangelo’s in his honour. His other large-scale commissions include wall-sculptures for the Ellen Fairclough Building in Hamilton, Ontario, and the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. He executed painted outdoor murals in Owen Sound and Mount Forest, Ontario. Markle was killed in a traffic accident in 1990. Of Mohawk ancestry, Markle used his mother’s spelling of his surname, although it was spelled “Maracle” on his birth certificate. Markle worked primarily in painting and ink drawing, and also explored photography, collage, printmaking, wooden sculpture and neon. He collected folk art, which inspired a number of whirligig works later in his career. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada.

Florence Vale, Canadian artist, was born on April 18, 1909 in llford, Essex, England and died on July 23, 2003 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her family immigrated to Toronto two years after her birth, where she grew up with an interest in music. She married artist Albert Franck on June 8, 1929, and together they bought a house on Hazelton Avenue in Toronto which became a centre for artists, writers, musicians, and critics. Florence Vale was the mother of two children, Trudy (who died as an infant) and Anneke.
Florence Vale began to paint with her husband’s paints and brushes in the late 1940’s with no previous artistic training – only what she had learned under the influence of her husband and the artists who visited her home. Her art was influenced by Surrealism, Cubism, Expressionism, and the works of Paul Klee. After her husband’s death in 1973, Florence Vale continued to express her artistic ability with oil paints, collages, and ink, also including her own poetry in some of her works. Many of her works, most prominently after the death of her husband, were erotic, while still viewed by critics as keeping a whimsical, innocent tone. Her art appeared in exhibitions throughout Ontario, with exhibitions also in Quebec and New York, U.S.A. She was associated with the Gadatsy Gallery, Toronto.

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.

Jules Frederic Wegman was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland on 14 July 1865 and received his early education there. He came to the United States with his father Julius, also an architect, at the age of ten years and trained with him. At one point he was sent to Jerusalem to measure the city and its buildings, and his drawings were used to reproduce the city at the Worlds’ Fair at St. Louis in 1904. Wegmen then spent several years in the Chicago office of Daniel H. Burnham & Co., a leading figure of American architecture. He appears to have also worked there under his own name, and is credited with the design of the Newbury Building, South Wabash Avenue at East Ninth Street in Chicago, in 1896. In 1905 he was invited to join the Toronto firm of Darling & Pearson, and worked there until his death in 1931, becoming a partner in 1924. He worked on the Sun Life Building in Montreal, the North Toronto Station at Yonge and Summerhill, and the 1925 expansion of the Art Gallery of Toronto. He spoke at least four languages fluently and traveled widely, collecting photographs and drawings of architectural details. In 1911 he joined the Arts and Letters Club and lunched there regularly. In 1912 he was Chairman of the Toronto Chapter of the Ontario Association of Architects and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada shortly before his death.

Avis Lang [Rosenberg] (1944-) is an art historian, teacher, curator, writer and editor who lived in Vancouver for many years. In 1972, as a member of the faculty of the Fine Art Department at the University of British Columbia, she wrote to Canadian artist Jack Chambers (1931-1978) beginning a correspondence that led Chambers to invite her contribution to a scholarly monograph on his work. In 1973, Peter Mellen took over the editorial direction for the book and differences of opinion prompted her to resign the project. Her essay, “The Hart of London: a film by Jack Chambers” was included in The Films of Jack Chambers, edited by Kathryn Elder (Cinematheque Ontario and Indiana State University Press, 2002).

The Tovell family of Toronto, in particular Harold Murchison Tovell (1887-1947), Ruth Massey Tovell (1889-1961) and their son Vincent Massey Tovell (b. 1922), was active in art circles in Toronto for several decades following the First World War. Harold Tovell and Ruth Massey married in 1910 and in 1913-1914 travelled in Europe, visiting the major art galleries. Returning to Toronto, they lived on the eastern edge of the city in Dentonia Park, the Massey estate, until 1936 when they moved to the city centre. The Tovells built a collection of works by Canadian and European artists. In France in 1926 they met French painter Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) through their friend American author and artist Walter Pach (1883-1958). In 1928 they purchased a painting by Duchamp’s older half-brother Jacques Villon (1875-1963) at an exhibition in New York. They met Jacques and Gaby Villon in Paris in 1930 and corresponded with them until the 1960s. The Villons befriended Vincent who visited them in France in the years before the Second World War. From 1941 to 1947, the Tovells lived near Port Hope, Ontario. After her husband’s death, Mrs Tovell returned to live in Toronto. Harold and Ruth Tovell had three other sons: Walter (b. 1916), a geologist and Director of the Royal Ontario Museum 1972-1975, Freeman (b. 1918), diplomat and historian, and Harold (1919-2002), a physician. They bequeathed many of their artworks to the Royal Ontario Museum, the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

George Agnew Reid (1860-1947) was a Canadian artist, architect, educator and administrator influential in the early 20th century and instrumental in the formation of a number of important Canadian art institutions. Born in Wingham Ontario to a Scottish farm family, he studied architecture and book-keeping at his father’s insistence. In 1878 he moved to Toronto to study art. He was able to extend his art education under Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia, where he met the painter Mary Heister. In 1888 the couple travelled to Europe and studied at the Julian and Colorossi Academies, returning to Toronto in 1889. The house he designed and built in Wychwood Park was his home until the end of his life. In 1890, George Reid began reaching at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design. He eventually became principal and researched new theories of art education in the United States and Europe. Under his direction, the art school became independent of the Board of Education and moved into its own building, which he designed, in 1921. He also served as its first Principal. In 1892, George and Mary Reid built two cottages from his design at the artist colony in Onteora, New York. This led to the design of other summer homes and a small church in the Catskills community. They spent summers at this location until 1917 when the war made travel to the United States difficult. In 1921 Mary Heister Reid died, and in 1923 George Reid married Mary Wrinch, a former student and close friend of his first wife. His later life was filled with accomplishments, including the painting of murals for public spaces in Toronto City Hall, Jarvis Collegiate, the Royal Ontario Museum and elsewhere. He was instrumental in obtaining permanent funding and staff for the National Gallery in Ottawa, and was a force behind the establishment of the Art Gallery of Toronto. He was a member of the RCA, serving as President 1906-1907. He influenced a generation of students, among them C.W. Jefferys, through his teaching and created a number of works that exemplify his generation, including Forbidden Fruit, Mortgaging the Homestead, and The Foreclosure of the Mortgage.

Workscene Gallery was a non-profit, artist-run co-operative gallery in Toronto, 1974-1995. It originally provided studio space and a venue for exhibitions of members’ works, later expanding to exhibiting other artists’ works and curated exhibitions. Members were responsible for all programming and administration with individual artists responsible for content, installation and promotion of exhibitions. Members were required to have a strong art practice, to provide financial support through membership fees and be committed to promoting the arts community.
The co-operative was incorporated May 16, 1974 as Workscene Co-operative Corporation with the following directors: Gissa Geraldine Gold, Ian James Shaw, James Henry Tiley, Robert John Varty and Badanna Bernice Zack. In May 1988, the corporation was re-activated by the current group of artist members who began operating the Workscene Galley at 1020 Queen Street West as an exhibition space. This storefront gallery was formerly the Ruby-Fiorino Gallery and the co-operative remained in this space until the lease expired at the end of August 1990. In September 1990, Workscene Gallery relocated to 183 Bathurst Street, a building which was a focal point at that time for Toronto’s arts community and housed other artist-run centres, arts organizations and magazines. Workscene Co-operative Corporation also produced a magazine as an independent program, Work Seen Artists Forum, to provide a forum for artists to write about their work and issues of concern. In the summer of 1992 the magazine became a separate entity with no ties to the Workscene Gallery, changing its name to Artword Artists Forum.
Workscene Co-operative Corporation was dissolved in February 1992. Workscene Gallery Art Association Toronto Inc. was formed in June 1992 with the following directors: Jocelyne Regina Belcourt Salem (President), Yvonne Maria Eva Singer (1st Vice President), Ian David Lazarus (2nd Vice President), David John Renaud (Treasurer), and Sheila Ann Gregory (Secretary). The final exhibition of Workscene Gallery ended January 28, 1995 and was documented in a number of newspaper articles describing the event. Workscene ceased operations permanently in 1995.

John Faichney is a Canadian dancer, television producer and software analyst born in Montreal in 1952. He graduated from Oberlin College where he developed an interest in choreography and dance improvisation. In May 1976 he performed at the Centre for Experimental Art & Communication (CEAC) in Toronto and was invited to join the Centre’s staff. Amongst other activities, he designed printed matter, maintained exchange programs with other artists’ groups, curated an exhibition of artists’ books and managed distribution of mailings and periodicals (including Strike, a quasi monthly newspaper.) An offshoot of the Kensington Art Association, CEAC moved in 1976 to 86 John Street and then to 15 Duncan Street, offering space for performance art, installations, videos and music. Key members of the group were Amerigo Marras, Suber Corley, Bruce Eves and Ron Gillespie (a.k.a Ron Giii); Marras in particular encouraged connections with European and American artists. The group became increasingly politicized and in 1978 its government funding was rescinded. An attempt at self sufficiency by starting a television production studio at 124 Lisgar Street was not sustainable and CEAC disbanded in 1980. John Faichney lives in Kitchener, Ontario, and remains involved with Contact Improvisation.

Jack (John Richard) Chambers, artist and experimental filmmaker, was born in London, Ontario in 1931. He studied at the Escuela Central de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid from 1957 to 1959. In Spain he met Olga Sanchez Bustos, whom he married in Canada in 1963. They made their home in London and had two children, John (b. 1964) and Diego (b.1965). Chambers’ style of painting and drawing in the 1960s was characterized by a dreamlike quality. Toward the end of that decade, his work became intensely focused on the depiction of reality, often relating closely to source photographs, most of which were taken by the artist himself. Between 1964 and 1970 Chambers also directed eight films. The subjects of his work were often domestic or regional, focusing on his experience in London. In 1967, Chambers founded Canadian Artists’ Representation to try to establish fee scales for reproduction rights and rental fees for works in public exhibitions, and served as president from 1967 to 1975. In 1969 Chambers published his essay “Perceptual Realism”, and that same year, was diagnosed with leukemia. From 1971 to 1977 he worked on “Red and Green,” a study of art and perception (unpublished). Chambers died in London in 1978. His work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and numerous other Canadian galleries.

Newton McFaul MacTavish (1875-1941) was a Canadian journalist, art critic and early art historian. Born in Staffa, Ontario, he became a reporter at The Toronto Globe in 1896 and was its assistant financial editor until 1900. From then until 1906, he studied English literature at McGill University while working as a correspondent and business representative of The Globe in Montreal. In 1903 he married Kate Johnson. Between 1906 and 1926, MacTavish was the editor of The Canadian Magazine in Toronto. In 1910 he travelled to Europe and visited the Canadian artists J.W. Morrice and John Wentworth Russell in Paris. He subsequently (1922-1933) served as a trustee of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia conferred honorary degrees on Newton MacTavish in 1924 (M.A.) and 1928 (D. Litt.). From 1926 to 1932 he was a member of the Civil Service Commission of Canada. A founder of the Arts and Letters Club (Toronto), he was also on the editorial advisory board of and contributor to the Encyclopedia of Canada (1932-1935). In addition to his articles, essays and short stories, MacTavish was the author of Thrown In (1923), The Fine Arts in Canada (1925, the first full-length history of Canadian art), and Ars Longa (1938). A fourth work, Newton MacTavish’s Canada, was published posthumously in 1963. He died in Toronto in 1941.

The Master Print and Drawing Society of Ontario (MPDSO) is the first independent body of specialist collectors of prints and drawings in Canada. Founded in 1985 by Sidney Bregman and Katharine Lochnan, the Society first came into existence as the Master Print and Drawing Society, and operated as a non-profit educational association that provided special assistance to its members with problems unique to collecting. The Society is officially affiliated with the Art Gallery of Ontario, but is an independent organization belonging to its members, and through its Board of Directors determines its objectives, policies and activities, requirements for membership, selection of new members, and the composition of its executive. The executive consists of the President, Vice-President(s), Secretary/Treasurer, and Directors. The President has primary responsibility for determining the Society's activities, making arrangements for lectures, tours, and other special events. Since 1989, the MPDSO has been supported by the Fraser Elliot Foundation in fulfilling its mandate to represent the collective interests of its members in seeking out the expert advice of scholars, curators, and visiting lectures to contribute special assistance with collecting master prints and drawings from the 15th to the mid 20th century.

Arthur Lismer, painter and art educator, was born in Sheffield, England in 1885. He studied at the Sheffield School of Art 1899–1906 and later at the Académie royale des beaux-arts in Antwerp. In 1911 he immigrated to Toronto where he worked as a commercial illustrator for the Grip Engraving Company and taught at the Ontario College of Art. He married Esther Mawson in 1912 and their only child Marjorie was born in 1913. Lismer's career as an art educator began at the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax, 1916–1919, followed soon after by his appointment as Vice-President of the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. In 1920 he became a founding member of the Group of Seven. His best-known works in oil are wilderness landscapes, expressionist in style with a use of raw colour and simplified form. He also produced many works on paper, including several portraits. Lismer established a Children's Art Centre at the Art Gallery of Toronto, where he was educational supervisor, 1927–1938. He was briefly educational supervisor at the National Gallery of Canada, later holding that post at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 1941 to 1967. He was assistant professor of fine arts at McGill University, 1948–1954. He died in Montreal in 1969. Arthur Lismer was a member of the Arts and Letters Club, Ontario Society of Artists, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Canadian Group of Painters, Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, and Federation of Canadian Artists. His work is in many Canadian public collections. Following her father’s death, Marjorie Lismer Bridges devoted a number of years to organizing his archival records and gradually donating them to public repositories. She wrote the “Arthur Lismer source book”, which is included in the fonds.

Charles William Jefferys (1869-1951) was a prolific Canadian artist, illustrator and author. He was a talented landscape painter whose work was widely exhibited and collected, but is best known for his illustrations of Canada’s past. He was born in Rochester, Kent. In 1875 the Jefferys family emigrated to Philadelphia, then in 1878 they moved to Hamilton before settling in Toronto around 1880. Jefferys began formal training as an artist in 1884 when he started attending evening classes at the Ontario School of Art. The following year, Jefferys began a five-year apprenticeship at the Toronto Lithographic Company, where he was also hired out to work occasionally as an illustrator for The Globe. He worked as an artist for The Globe, as well as for a number of other Canadian newspapers until the fall of 1892 when he was taken on as an artist-reporter for The New York Herald. Jefferys lived in New York and New Jersey until 1899, returning to Canada permanently in 1901, eventually settling in York Mills. Jefferys illustrated a large number of books and articles providing illustrations for The Makers of Canada (1903-1911), Chronicles of Canada (1914-1916), was co-founder of the satirical periodical The Moon (1902-1904), and wrote and illustrated Canada’s Past in Pictures (1934) and The Picture Gallery of Canadian History (1942, 1945, 1950). He also gave frequent lectures and published numerous articles on art, architecture, and Canadian history. From 1912 to 1939 Jefferys was instructor of freehand drawing at the Department of Architecture at the University of Toronto. He also was a lecturer and part-time instructor at the Ontario College of Art. Jefferys worked for Canadian War Records in 1918, recording the activities Polish Army in Exile at Niagara and Toronto and the Siberian Army in Exile in at Camp Petawawa, Ontario. Jefferys was active in many organizations, including the Ontario Society of Artists, Royal Canadian Academy, Art Students’ League, and the Arts and Letters Club. He exhibited his art widely throughout his life, in Canada and abroad, and his work appears in major institutions across Canada. Robert Stacey (1949- ) is the grandson of C.W. Jefferys. He is an art historian, author, editor, picture editor and curator based out of Toronto. Has written numerous books and articles on C.W. Jefferys and many other aspects relating to Canadian art and graphic design, with titles including The Hand Holding the Brush: Self Portraits by Canadian Artists, Canadian Bookplates, Massanog: the art of Bon Echo, and Sir Daniel Wilson (1816-1892): ambidextrous polymath.

Lawrence Arthur Colley Panton (1894-1954) was a Canadian painter, educator and academician active in Toronto from the 1930s until his death. Born in England, he immigrated to Canada at 17. He served in the Army during 1916-1919 and studied art in the evening after his return from the war. In Toronto, he worked at Rous and Mann as a designer until 1924 when he began his teaching career, first at the Central Technical School and then at Western Technical School (1926-37), Northern Vocational School (1937-51) and finally principal of the Ontario College of Art (1951-54). In 1920 he married Marion Pye; their son Charles was born in 1921 and died in action in 1944. Panton was active in a number of organizations, including the Ontario Society of Artists (President 1931-37), the Canadian Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, the Canadian Group of Painters, The Royal Canadian Academy and the Arts and Letters Club (President 1953-54).