Historical Art
19th and 20th Century American and European
Antoine Blanchard (1910-1988)
Antoine Blanchard was born in France on November 15, 1910 in a small village near the banks of the Loire. Antoine would watch his father hand carve furniture and began to display an artistic flair early in life. To promote this talent, his parents sent him to Blois for drawing lessons. He continued his training in Rennes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he studied sculpture and drawing. By 1932 he left Rennes and traveled to Paris to study. He enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It was in Paris that he developed a love for the city and its street life.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draftsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the decadent and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris, yielded an oeuvre of provocative images of modern life.
Historical Canadian
Laura Lyall Muntz (1860-1930)
Laura Lyall Muntz was a self made and very successful painter of children' s portraits. She emigrated from England to Muskoka in 1869. She spent time at the Toronto Art School before becoming a school teacher in Hamilton. Her studies later took her back to England to study at the South Kensington School of Art and then to France. She exhibited five times in the Paris Salon before returning to Canada and settling in Montreal with her husband in 1908. Some of her best work, painted at the turn of the century, consists of intimate mother-child subjects.
Walter J. Phillips (1884-1963)
A great Canadian watercolourist and printmaker, Walter J. Phillips was born in England and studied under Edward Taylor at the Birmingham School of Art (1899-1902). He spent a few years in Africa before immigrating to Winnipeg and settling in Calgary, Alberta in 1941. After only a few years in Canada, he drew a great deal of attention from public galleries and collectors. He is best known for his colour woodcuts, influenced by Japanese colour woodcut techniques, and his watercolours paintings.