Glossary of Canadian Art History

Founded in 1859 as a framing workshop, W. Scott and Sons became an important gallery and art dealer in Montreal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By importing work by British and French painters, W. Scott and Sons introduced a new level of artistic production to the Montreal market. In 1892 it became the first gallery in Canada to show work by the French Impressionists.

Born in Trinidad to German parents, Wagschal is a Montreal-based painter and faculty member at Concordia University. Her figurative paintings feature portraits that carry allegorical meanings and reveal the influence of nineteenth-century artists including Delacroix, Goya, and Manet. Working in a realist style, Wagschal often depicts families and everyday scenes, avoiding idealizing the bodies of her subjects and imbuing ordinary life with references that include the Holocaust and Jewish history.

An early collector of photography, Sam Wagstaff was a New York City curator whose 1964 exhibition Black, White and Gray was one of the first to focus on what would become Minimalism. In the 1970s, influenced by his romantic relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Wagstaff shifted his focus to photography. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired Wagstaff’s collection of photographs in 1984.

One of the leading bankers in Ontario in the later 1800s and early 1900s, Walker was an important philanthropist interested in education and the arts. He supported the University of Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Museum of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario), and the National Gallery of Canada.

A sculptor and painter of portraits, flower studies, and landscapes trained at London’s Slade School of Art. Walker’s palette, sombre at first, brightened over the course of her career to hues more evocative of Impressionism. In 1900 she became the first woman member of the New English Art Club, founded in 1885 as an alternative to the more conventional Royal Academy.

A painter and mixed-media artist influenced by Paterson Ewen and specializing in stylized Canadian landscapes, urban geographies, and aerial views, Walker studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax. His works are found in, among other collections, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the City of Ottawa.

Although born and raised in rural Ontario, Walker specialized in paintings of French rural life, especially on Île d’Orléans, Quebec, where he lived for many years and where he took up permanent residence in 1928. His widely admired art drew upon Jean-François Millet’s depictions of the rural poor in France and the naturalism of the Barbizon school. Walker was a founding member of the Canadian Art Club in 1907, serving as the club’s president in 1915.

A prominent practitioner of contemporary landscape painting, WalkingStick is known for creating monumental works that communicate spiritual truth and the symbolic importance of land in relation to its first inhabitants and all its citizens. Her work engages with Indigenous cultural identity and history, feminism, and Minimalism, and other art historical movements. Her first major retrospective was a touring exhibition, which opened at the National Museum of the American Indian in 2015.

A leading figure in contemporary photography since the 1980s, whose conceptual, life-size colour prints and backlit transparencies often refer to historical painting and cinema. Wall’s work exemplifies the aesthetic of what is sometimes called the Vancouver School, which includes the photographers Vikky Alexander, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, and Ken Lum, among others.

The Walter Phillips Gallery was established in 1976 to honour Phillips, an influential printmaker and painter, for his contributions to the visual arts program at the Banff School of Fine Arts. With a focus on contemporary art, the gallery has showcased the work of artists including H.G. Glyde, A.Y. Jackson, Takao Tanabe, Rebecca Belmore, and Brian Jungen.

A belt created from purple and white wampum beads made from clamshells. Traditional to Eastern Woodlands Indigenous peoples, wampum belts have various purposes, generally ceremonial and diplomatic in nature. The belts’ coded and symbolic bead arrangements may be used to invite other nations to a meeting, serve as a record of an agreement or treaty, or represent leadership positions or a person’s certificate of office. For the Haudenosaunee, for instance, wampum belts are also used to raise a new chief and as a way to bind peace between nations.

A sculptor known for his conceptual art, including his stainless-steel jiashanshi. Chinese artists traditionally placed gnarled stones—jiashanshi (literally “fake mountain rocks”)—in public areas for meditation and decoration, and scholars admired the naturally eroded shapes. Wang’s work, which pairs contemporary materials with customary practices, considers the changing nature of tradition in modern times.

One of the most important artists of the twentieth century and a central figure in Pop art. With his serial screen prints of commercial items like Campbell’s Soup cans and portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis, Warhol defied the notion of the artwork as a singular, handcrafted object.

A painting medium in which pigments are suspended in a water-based solution and the term that refers to a finished work painted in that medium, watercolour has a long history both in manuscript illumination (dating to Ancient Egypt) and in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese brush or scroll painting. In Western art, it became a preferred medium for sketching in the Renaissance and grew in popularity through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially for botanical and wildlife illustrations. It continues to be used by artists and illustrators because of its transparency and the effects possible by laying washes of pure pigment.

Born in England and based in Toronto, Waters immigrated to Canada in 1979 and, following his schooling, enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces prior to becoming a professional artist. Notable for his expressive portraits of Canadian servicemen, he participated in the Canadian Forces Artists Program twice, first in 2006 and again in 2010.

A Hamilton, Ontario-born photographer who was underrecognized for many decades, but who is now considered a pioneer of modernist photography. Watkins studied under Clarence H. White and had a successful career in advertising in the 1920s, specializing in artfully composed still lifes. In the 1930s she travelled to Europe and created avant-garde industrial landscape photographs before falling into obscurity in Glasgow, where she lived until her death.

A landscape painter, Watson was famous for his depictions of southern Ontario. He was born in Doon, in Waterloo County, and spent most of his life there, where he not only painted views of the countryside, he took an interest in protecting the local environment. The first president of the Canadian Art Club, he was a widely respected leader in Canadian art at the turn of the century. (See Homer Watson: Life & Work  by Brian Foss.)

A commercial artist, painter, and educator, Watson was a member of the Canadian Group of Painters and an instructor and eventually head of the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), Toronto. His work is held by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinberg, Ontario; and Hart House at the University of Toronto.

Inspired by commedia dell’arte and the opera ballet, Watteau was a Rococo painter who depicted amorous scenes of elaborately costumed revellers in lush imagined landscapes, each work evoking a mood rather than a specific narrative. His interest in theatrical motifs was likely the result of his early work as a set decorator in Paris, and when he was elected as a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (from 1816 the Académie des Beaux-Arts), it was not as a painter of one of the five established academic categories but of fêtes galantes, a new one created to describe his bucolic tableaux. In addition to painting, Watteau created chalk drawings of figures and faces using the trois crayons technique of employing white, red, and black chalk to prismatic effect. His work circulated widely in his lifetime and experienced a resurgence in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Born in England, Watts, an artist, architect, and civil servant, immigrated to Canada in 1873. He worked as a draftsman for the Department of Public Works in Ottawa and later as an architect, designing grand residences in the city. As an accomplished etcher, Watts played an important role in the Etching Revival movement in the late nineteenth century. He would become the first curator of the National Gallery of Canada.

A painter who lived for several years in Toronto, working as a self-taught portraitist and managing the Theatre Royal, which produced panoramas, recitations, and dance shows. He later studied painting in Rome and Naples before returning to the United States where he established himself as a portraitist and landscape painter. His two critically acclaimed panoramas of Italy were exhibited in Philadelphia in the mid-1850s.

A member of the first graduating class of the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts in 1929, Weatherbie was a painter and an influential figure in the city’s art scene. Romantically involved with fellow painter Frederick Varley, she served as a model for some of his best-known portraits and taught at the British Columbia College of Art. In 1942 she married art critic Harold Mortimer-Lamb, father of painter Molly Lamb Bobak.

Founded in 1961, Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden (now WZMH Architects) is a Toronto architecture firm. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was responsible for many significant modernist projects that were part of the transformation of Toronto’s downtown, including the CN Tower and the Royal Bank Plaza. In the 1980s and 1990s, the firm expanded its practice internationally. Current clients are located across Canada and around the world.

A Russian-born painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer, trained as an artist in Paris. Weber’s early admiration and adoption of European modernist movements—including Fauvism and Cubism—made him one of the most significant artists of the American avant-garde.

This Czech-born Canadian immigrant was, with Denis Tupy, cofounder of Blue Mountain Pottery, a Canadian pottery brand collected internationally and recognized for its unique glazing process.

A New York City-born artist best known as a founding figure in the Conceptual art movement of the mid-twentieth century. His work relied heavily on text and language and was often site-specific, installed on gallery walls and exhibition spaces as well as various objects in public spaces.

A painter who moved from southern Ontario to Parry Sound in the 1950s, Bert Weir created gestural, richly coloured paintings of the northern Ontario bush. He hosted a summer retreat for Toronto artists in the 1950s and 1960s and taught art in Sudbury and throughout northeastern Ontario.

A leading member of the Hague School, Jan Weissenbruch is best known for his watercolour paintings of landscapes, beaches, and cityscapes of Dutch life. Weissenbruch trained with Johannes Low and the scenery painter Bart van Hove, travelling abroad only to visit Paris and the village of Barbizon.

Established in 1960 as a formalized organization, the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative is an artists’ co-operative that houses a print shop. It markets and sells Inuit carvings and prints, in particular through its affiliate in the South, Dorset Fine Arts. Since approximately 2006 the arts and crafts sector of the co-op has been referred to as Kinngait Studios.

Influential painter of historical, mythological, and religious subjects, as well as commissioned portraits. West co-founded the Royal Academy of Arts in London and served as its president in 1792. One of his most recognized paintings, The Death of General Wolfe,1770, is a fictionalized portrayal of the death of British general James Wolfe at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759) during the Seven Years’ War.

A Vancouver artist-run centre founded by eight artists in 1973. A locus of innovative artistic activity throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it played a key role in the development of interdisciplinary, ephemeral, media-based, performance, and electronic art. It remains an important centre for contemporary art and music.

A significant figure in Canadian painting whose expressionistic and imaginative landscapes recall those of his better-known contemporaries the Group of Seven and Emily Carr. Weston was the first West Coast artist to be elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. His work is held by major institutions around the country.

A photographic process introduced by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851 and popular until the 1880s. It is typically used in the production of negatives. Collodion, a substance derived from nitrocellulose, was combined in a liquid base with chemical salts, then poured onto a glass plate and sensitized; the plate had to be exposed and developed immediately.

One of the first women in the United States to work as a professional interior designer, Candace Wheeler was one of the original members of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s design company, Associated Artists. Her textile designs originally drew on British influences such as William Morris, but they developed into a cosmopolitan American style that included references to Japanese design. A supporter of women’s professional roles in art and design, Wheeler founded the Society of Decorative Art of New York City and, after leaving Tiffany’s company, her own Associated Artists, which had an all-female staff. With her brother, Francis Beatty Thurber, she founded the Onteora Club in the Catskill Mountains.

Whistler, a painter and printmaker, was a leading promoter of “art for art’s sake”: the doctrine that an artist should create evocative visual experiences based principally on the subtle harmonization of colour, not on sentiment or moral lessons. Believing that painting and music had much in common, he used music references in the titles of many of his paintings, including Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, 1871 (better known as Whistler’s Mother). In 1877 the art critic John Ruskin accused him of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” when Whistler exhibited Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Whistler sued Ruskin, but was awarded damages of only one farthing.

An Ohio-born photographer and teacher considered to be one of the founding members of the Photo-Secession movement, which advanced the acceptance of photography as a medium of fine art. In 1914 he established the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York City, where his students included notable figures such as Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Watkins.

An artist who drew imagery from Plains Indigenous art and claimed to be a member of the Sioux Nation. In the 1990s White came under criticism when it was revealed that he was not of Indigenous descent.

Dedicated to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art is a New York City institution focused on collecting and showing the work of American artists from the twentieth century to the present. It was founded in 1931 after the Metropolitan Museum of Art refused Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s gift of her collection of contemporary American art and was the first American museum to prioritize living artists in its collections and exhibitions. Though it has branches throughout the city, since 2015 the museum has been located in the Meatpacking District of Lower Manhattan.

A Vancouver-born multimedia artist and educator primarily known for her installation and sculptural works, which have been featured in over thirty-five solo exhibitions over the last six decades. Based in Montreal since the late 1960s, Whittome taught in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University from 1968 to 2007.

A central figure in contemporary Canadian art, Wieland engaged with painting, filmmaking, and cloth and plastic assemblage to explore with wit and passion ideas related to gender, national identity, and the natural world. In 1971 she became the first living Canadian woman artist to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. (See Joyce Wieland: Life & Work by Johanne Sloan.)

A figurative painter and professor in the art department at Wayne State University, in Detroit, for thirty-eight years. Wilbert painted a variety of subjects, including portraits, figures, and objects of everyday life, imbuing ordinary scenes with a mystical quality. A prominent figure in the Detroit art scene, Wilbert was commissioned to design the first commemorative state postage stamp celebrating the 150th anniversary of the state of Michigan in 1987.

A popular and controversial playwright and poet, known for works such as The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Wilde had an international reputation for his brilliant wit, sparkling prose, flamboyant clothing, advocacy of the Aesthetic Movement, and insistence on the importance of beauty in daily life and the autonomy of art. His imprisonment from 1895 to 1897 for gross indecency remains a touchstone in LGBTQ2+ history.

The first artist known to have worked exclusively in light as his preferred medium. Beginning in 1919 with his invention of the Clavilux light organ, Wilfred composed sequences of light forms designed to be played on the machine and projected on a dark screen. Called lumia, his compositions resemble the aurora borealis and are durational, lasting from 5 minutes and 15 seconds to 9 years, 127 days, and 18 hours. 

A groundbreaking feminist artist whose work examines issues of gender, sexuality, and feminism. Wilke was one of the first artists to employ vaginal imagery as a feminist visual motif. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, she created delicately folded sculptures that evoke female genitalia. In the 1970s, Wilke developed a type of performance that she called “performalist self-portraits,” in which she used her own body to critique the objectification of women.

An artist and curator, and an increasingly important figure in Canadian arts and culture. A member of Secwepemc Nation, Willard’s community-engaged practice often explores the common ground between Aboriginal and other cultures. Her exhibition Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture toured nationally after opening at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2011.

The William Brymner Prize was created in 1933 to honour the brilliant career of the painter William Brymner (1855-1925) in his position as professor at the school of the Art Association of Montreal (1886-1921). The prize was reserved for artists under the age of thirty who were ​either Canadian ​citizens or were British subjects who had resided in Canada for two years. Funded by a group of Brymner’s friends, the competition was held only in 1934. The Art Association of Montreal held an exhibition ​for a selection of works from the competition ​called Exhibition of paintings from the William Brymner Competition for painters under 30 years of age and British subjects, which took place in its rooms from January 31 to February 11, 1934. A portrait painted by Moira Drummond won the first prize ($200) and a landscape by Jean Paul Lemieux, House​s at Éboulements (Maison aux Éboulements), the second prize ($100).

A multimedia artist and curator of Potawatomi descent working mainly in sculpture, painting, and mixed media. He studied at George Brown College, the Emily Carr College of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art + Design), and McGill University and has curated several important exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art.

Associated with the Woodland School and the Triple K Cooperative, Williams is a painter and graphic artist whose subjects include Indigenous myths and legends, spirits, and animals, which he portrays in the X-ray style.

A doctor as well as a poet, Williams experimented with form as he sought to write in a distinctly American idiom that would allow him to represent a domestic world in precise detail. The friends who surrounded him while he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, especially fellow poet Ezra Pound, had a profound influence on his style and he became absorbed into the Imagist movement. Later, Williams was rediscovered by the postwar Beat Generation of writers, who appreciated the directness and plain language of his poems. In addition to poetry, Williams wrote and published three novels, a trilogy that followed the life of an American family based on his wife’s.

A painter who was particularly recognized for his portraits but also produced landscapes and genre scenes. Williamson was influenced by his study abroad and Dutch Realism, and his work was often dark and tonal. He was a founding member of the Canadian Art Club and the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto.

An artist, photographer, and writer, Elizabeth Willmott was interested in Structurist art, creating three-dimensional painted relief sculptures. Willmott contributed, visually and textually, to the Canadian international art journal The Structurist.

Known for her quilt paintings, a body of work begun in the late 1950s in which the artist used traditional American quilts as her canvases, Ann Wilson is an artist associated with the Coenties Slip community. From the 1970s to the present she has worked in installation and performance, including a series of installations created in collaboration with Paul Thek. Wilson cites Agnes Martin and Lenore Tawney as two major early influences on her work, fostering interests in geometry and textile, respectively.

An artist and scholar of early British history and the indigenous populations of North America. Wilson left Edinburgh for Canada in 1853 to chair a department at the newly founded University College, Toronto. His study of Native culture informed his enlightened view that all humankind shares ingenuity and ability and that geographical and climatic circumstances rather than biological destiny determine any society’s development.

A photographer and editor of the journal Philadelphia Photographer, and a friend of William Notman, Wilson was the sole official photographer of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the first world’s fair held in the United States.

A Philadelphia-born feminist artist who works mainly in photography, film, and performance, often using role-play, costuming, language, and self-portraiture to explore issues of gender and subjectivity. She earned her BA from Wilmington College in Ohio before attending graduate school at Dalhousie University. She taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) and, in 1976, founded the Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., an artist-run space in Brooklyn dedicated to the advancement of artist’s books and video and performance art.

A New Mexico-based Diné photographer who has used historical photographic techniques such as the tintype process to create new, collaborative, and empowered archives of Indigenous photographic portraits. Since 2005, Wilson’s series Auto Immune Response has examined the relationship between a Diné man and the toxic post-apocalyptic environment in which he lives. Wilson holds an MFA from the University of New Mexico.

A painter, collagist, and prominent muralist who lived for many years in Mexico. Wilson worked as a commercial illustrator prior to the 1930s, and while he experimented with abstraction for much of his life, he never abandoned his concern for drawing technique, which he worked continually to refine.

Born in Plymouth, U.K., Windeyer trained in architecture in England and in the United States before moving to Montreal in 1862 where he established a successful practice. He moved to Toronto in 1871, and the following year he was a founding member of the Ontario Society of Artists. He worked on several government buildings and churches.

Established in 1912, the Winnipeg Art Gallery has the world’s largest public collection of Inuit art; it displayed Inuit sculpture for the first time in December 1953, and began systematic purchases for its permanent collection in 1957. In 1960 the gallery made a serious commitment when it purchased 139 major pieces from George Swinton. Over the years, the gallery’s Inuit art collection has grown to its present size of close to 13,200 works largely through the donation or purchase of large collections, including the enormous 4,000-piece Jerry Twomey Collection received in 1971. The gallery’s other primary collections are dedicated to Canadian historical and contemporary art, decorative art, and contemporary Canadian photography. It has moved several times in its history but has been in its current location since 1971.

Established in 1913 by the Winnipeg Industrial Bureau, the Winnipeg School of Art operated as its own entity until 1950, at which point it fell under the jurisdiction of the University of Manitoba and became the institution’s School of Art. The post-secondary program was founded with the dual intention of establishing a national style of art and positioning Winnipeg as an artistic centre. Some of Canada’s leading artists of the time, such as Frank H. Johnston and Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, worked as instructors at the School of Art.

One of the oldest clubs of its kind in Canada, the Winnipeg Sketch Club was formed out of the Winnipeg School of Art in 1914 by A.J. Musgrove, the school’s first principal. Its first exhibition was held in 1916. The club emphasizes drawing and painting from life and counts among its members Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, Frank Johnston, Eric Bergman, and Charles Comfort.

A sculptor born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and based in New York City, where she teaches at the School of Visual Arts. She is best known for her large-scale geometric sculptures and installations made with organic and natural materials. Winsor earned her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her MFA from Rutgers University. In 1979, she became the first woman artist since 1946 to be featured in a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

As director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from 1961 to 1991, William Withrow oversaw the gallery’s expansion and the acquisition of significant portions of its collection, along with its adventurous recognition of contemporary Canadian and American art. He remains the gallery’s longest-serving director and was responsible for the renovations that included the construction of the Sam and Ayala Zacks Pavilion, the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre, and the Canadian Wing. During his tenure, the gallery transitioned from its previous identity as the Art Gallery of Toronto to become a provincial institution with international stature.

A painter, photographer, illustrator, and poet who studied at the Bauhaus. Wols (the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) was active in Parisian Surrealist circles in the 1930s and helped establish Tachism and Art Informel, movements considered the European counterparts to American Abstract Expressionism.

Wolstenholme is a prolific artist and educator whose provocative, multidisciplinary practice encompasses collage, pen-and-ink drawing, embroidery, jewellery, and sculpture (for which she is perhaps best known). Her work is held in numerous Canadian institutions including Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. She was shortlisted for the prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2002.

This association, founded in 1887 by Mary Dignam, who was also the association’s first president, was inspired by the Art Students League in New York. Today it is a non-profit organization of approximately two hundred members that provides scholarships to women in various fields of fine art and crafts.

Founded in 1894 by Mary Martha Phillips and Mary Alice Skelton, the society advocated for women artists who had difficulty obtaining public showings of their work. Originally a branch of the Women’s Art Association, incorporated in Toronto in 1892, it became independent in 1907. The society supported soldiers during and after the First World War through fundraising efforts and establishing the Soldiers’ Fund to aid disabled veterans. It continues to promote women’s rights in the arts today.

A Vancouver-based multimedia artist whose works combine video, photography, installation, and performance as they probe issues of race, class, sex, memory, and mortality. An early pioneer of media art in Canada, he is one of the country’s leading video artists and the recipient of many prestigious honours including the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2005) and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts (2016).

Lauded in her time, this experimental sculptor created simplified and rigorous monuments, portraits, figures, and landscape sculptures in equally diverse materials. Wood was also an important and influential figure in Canadian modern art circles; she was a founder of the Sculptors’ Society of Canada and a teacher at Central Technical School in Toronto for nearly three decades.

An important regionalist painter of the American Midwest, best known for his endlessly reproduced and parodied double portrait American Gothic, 1930.  His interest in Netherlandish art of the fifteenth century is evident in his work from the late 1920s on, with its hard edges, strong colours, and meticulously executed details.

A relief method of printing that involves carving a design into a block of wood, which is then inked and printed, using either a press or simple hand pressure. This technique was invented in China and spread to the West in the thirteenth century.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Norval Morrisseau pioneered this school of artistic practice. Key characteristics of Woodland School art include the fusion of traditional Ojibway imagery and symbols with sensibilities of modernism and Pop art, as well as the fusion of X-ray-style motifs with bold colours and interconnected, curvilinear lines. Alex Janvier, Daphne Odjig, and Carl Ray are other prominent artists associated with the Woodland School.

Emily Henrietta Woods was an artist and arts educator who painted over two hundred life-sized watercolours of plants. Alongside her plant paintings, she included both their scientific and common names, and she sometimes noted the Indigenous uses of the depicted flora and fauna. Woods was also a former instructor to artist Emily Carr.

A British painter and architect best known for the landscape drawings and paintings he made of early nineteenth-century British North America as the official draftsman to George Ramsay, 9th Earl of Dalhousie (who was Governor of Nova Scotia from 1816 to 1820). As an architect, he assisted in the design and construction of Dalhousie College, which later became Dalhousie University.

After immigrating to Canada from England in 1957, Woolnough spent time in Mexico and Jamaica before settling in Prince Edward Island in the 1970s. A versatile artist notable for her printmaking and graphic skills, she received professional training in England and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and founded a lithography program at the Jamaica School of Art and Crafts (now the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts).

A respected art critic and the brother of Stanton Macdonald-Wright. His book Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning (1915) and numerous articles helped to promote Synchromism. He later became a successful detective novelist under the pen name S.S. Van Dine.

A British-born artist and educator who was the first female executive member of the Ontario Society of Artists (1924). Influenced by her teacher and husband, George Agnew Reid, she worked first in miniature on ivory and later produced watercolours, colour block prints, and oils. Notably, she preceded the Group of Seven by a decade in painting Canada’s northern landscapes in place.

Named after Wychwood in rural Oxfordshire, England, Wychwood Park is a Toronto, Ontario, neighbourhood. Founded by Marmaduke Matthews and George Agnew Reid as an artists’ colony in the late nineteenth century, the neighbourhood was amalgamated into the city of Toronto in 1909 but remains privately administered by an executive council of residents. Organized around a central park and pond, Wychwood Park still includes many of its original Arts and Crafts–style houses.

A painter who conveyed the people and pastoral landscapes of his rural Pennsylvania community in spare, poetic images. Though he received high critical praise for some paintings, including his famous Christina’s World, 1948, his realist, regionalist work was considered out of step with contemporary art for much of his career.

A painter and an arts educator, Wylde, whose speciality was portraiture, held a studio and taught art classes as a member of the Island Arts and Crafts Society in British Columbia.

Prominent sculptor and designer Wyle, together with her partner Frances Loring, shaped the landscape of Canadian sculpture. Influenced by classical Greek sculpture, Wyle specialized in anatomy and depicted women in various poses, from undertaking manual labour to the erotic. Wyle was a co-founder of the Sculptors Society of Canada and the first woman sculptor awarded full membership to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Originally founded as a public gallery named the Aggregation Gallery from 1968 to 1982, the Wynick/Tuck Gallery is a private gallery located in Toronto. It is owned and operated by Lynne Wynick and David Tuck and has represented renowned Canadian artists such as Doris McCarthy, Mary Pratt, and Michael Snow.

A prolific printmaker, painter, and multimedia artist whose work reflects an abiding interest in the natural world. Wyse immigrated to Canada in 1961 and settled in Cape Dorset, where he taught engraving. He moved to Ontario in 1964 and currently lives in Ottawa.