365 DAYS OF ART

 LIONEL LEMOINE FITZGERALD (1890–1956)

Rooted in his native city of Winnipeg, Lionel FitzGerald worked almost exclusively in Manitoba, where he captured the essence of the prairie in his art. Although he accepted the Group of Seven’s invitation to become a member in 1932, FitzGerald was less concerned than the group was to promote issues of Canadian identity. Instead he explored his surroundings, delving deeply into the forces he felt animated and united nature in order to make “the picture a living thing.” Quiet in personality and passionate about art, FitzGerald inspired a generation of students at the Winnipeg School of Art.

FitzGerald was born in 1890, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. While this prairie location is central to understanding his artistic universe, FitzGerald’s family roots were in Eastern Canada. In 1904 fourteen-year-old FitzGerald graduated from grade eight at Victoria Public School and worked for the next two years as an office boy in the pharmaceutical company Martin, Bole and Wynne. A restlessness with the daily routine of office work seems to have prompted his desire to draw. This was the starting point for an artistic career that would be based almost entirely on a close observation of nature in order to understand the underlying dynamic forces that FitzGerald felt animated all living things.

In March 1909 he enrolled in classes given by the Hungarian painter Alexander Samuel Keszthelyi (1874–1953), who had arrived in Winnipeg via Munich, Vienna, and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A.S. Keszthelyi’s School of Fine Arts gave instruction in “Drawing and Painting from the living model, Decorating, Designing and Portraiture.” Since drawing was the real foundation of FitzGerald’s artistic career, no matter what media he chose, his early training from life and still life allowed him to move forward as an artist.

The year 1912 proved to be a major turning point in FitzGerald’s life. In late November he eloped with Felicia (Vally) Wright (1883 or 84–1962). Vally was a trained soprano who made her living by teaching singing lessons and performing in church choirs. Employment opportunities for budding Canadian artists were limited, and around the time of his marriage FitzGerald began to work in the art department of an advertising firm in Winnipeg.

At the beginning of the First World War, FitzGerald’s viewing experience would have been informed primarily by Barbizon and Hague School pictures, both extremely conservative and popular types of nineteenth-century European landscape painting. His knowledge of such works probably occurred in 1910 during a brief stay in Chicago, where he likely visited the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1912 FitzGerald shared a studio with artist Donald Macquarrie (1872-1934), the first curator at the Winnipeg Museum of Fine Arts (now the Winnipeg Art Gallery) and FitzGerald’s sketching companion during that summer. Macquarrie’s aesthetic predilection for the Barbizon artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) may have influenced a series of small monoprints of urban and landscape scenes that FitzGerald made in 1914.

But FitzGerald was also beginning to try his hand at Impressionism. He was now working en plein air, perhaps encouraged by his friend the Winnipeg painter Mary Ewart (née Clay) (1872–1939), who had studied in the 1890s with the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). Nonetheless, FitzGerald’s knowledge of French Impressionism would have been second-hand, through his study of the black and white reproductions in The Studio magazine and its American counterpart, The International Studio, or mediated by a few paintings by Canadian Impressionist artists in Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 1918 FitzGerald sold an Impressionist-inspired painting, Late Fall, Manitoba, 1917, to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. His understanding of Impressionism developed rapidly, and two vibrantly coloured paintings—Summer, East Kildonan, 1920, and Summer Afternoon, The Prairie, 1921—mark the high point of his early career.

In January 1920 FitzGerald found employment with the American artist Augustus Vincent Tack (1870–1949), who had been commissioned to execute a mural in Manitoba’s Legislative Building in Winnipeg. The two worked together until the allegory was completed in July 1920. Tack’s commission brought attention to FitzGerald in the local Winnipeg art scene and helped secure his first one-man exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1921. The show was a commercial and critical success: eighteen works were sold, including the most expensive, Summer Afternoon, The Prairie, 1921, which was bought by the Art Gallery Committee of the Winnipeg Museum of Fine Arts for $300. 

In November 1921 FitzGerald moved to New York to attend art school at the Art Students League of New York from December 1921 to the end of March 1922. The Canadian-born artist Boardman Robinson (1876–1952) taught him “Drawing and Pictorial Design” and Kenneth Hayes Miller (1876–1952) instructed him in “Life Drawing and Painting for Men.” Both Robinson and Miller were competent traditional figure painters who would have helped FitzGerald hone his skills in the drawing studio.

Back in Winnipeg in 1924, FitzGerald was offered a position teaching design, drawing from plaster casts after classical antiquity, and still life at the Winnipeg School of Art. For a few years, he concentrated primarily on drawing in pen and pencil while he searched for ways to consolidate what he had learned in New York. Printmaking in drypoint, and later linocut, proved to be important additions to his technical arsenal.

FitzGerald had admired the paintings and activities of the Group of Seven from a distance and knew group member Frank Johnston (1888–1949), who was principal at the Winnipeg School of Art from 1921 to 1924. By the late 1920s the group was taking notice of FitzGerald. Lawren Harris (1885–1970) in particular expressed enthusiasm for FitzGerald’s drawings and initiated correspondence to share his admiration following FitzGerald’s first solo exhibition in Eastern Canada at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto in 1928. This precipitated a lifelong friendship characterized by mutual encouragement and understanding between the two artists. When they finally met in Vancouver in 1942, Harris continued to admire what he perceived to be an evocation of the mystic in FitzGerald’s work.

In 1930 and 1931 FitzGerald was invited to participate in Group of Seven exhibitions held at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario). When the group decided to expand their membership in 1932, FitzGerald was their unanimous choice and the only Western Canadian artist they ever considered. FitzGerald’s acceptance made him the tenth artist to become a member since the group’s inception. Although this was a boost to his confidence, he remained removed from the group due to both geographical distance and his personal aesthetic, which did not consider the landscape primarily as a vehicle for Canadian nationalism. FitzGerald exhibited with them only once as a member before they disbanded in 1933 to reorganize as the Canadian Group of Painters, of which FitzGerald was a founding member.

For FitzGerald, the formal relationships of line, colour, and shape in a picture were fundamentally more important than subject matter. Unity, balance, and harmony were always the prime objectives of his art. He hit his stride in his late thirties and early forties, creating at least a dozen oil paintings that are some of the finest of his career.

In his late career FitzGerald toggled between abstract works and the type of figuration characteristic of his earlier work. In late 1954 and through 1955, FitzGerald created a number of still-life drawings and watercolours depicting apples, bottles, and jugs that recall his work from the 1930s and 1940s. These culminated in the last major painting of his career, Still Life with Hat, 1955. This picture may be considered a symbolic self-portrait—it is of the hat FitzGerald wore sometimes when he went sketching on the prairie. It must have come as a great disappointment when the picture was refused by a jury of his peers for the 1956 exhibition of the Canadian Group of Painters.

Despite this setback, FitzGerald received an acknowledgement of his contributions to the arts in Winnipeg when the University of Manitoba awarded him an honorary doctor of laws in 1952. And when he acted as a juror at the 1953 Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, he was amazed to be treated with respect by his colleagues and accepted “as a living painter, and not ‘old hat.’”

THE ARTWORK

From an Upstairs Window, Winter is the crowning achievement of the interior/exterior views that characterized FitzGerald’s work to such an extent that art critic Robert Ayre referred to him as “the man who looks out of the window.” Here, the artist’s vantage point is from an attic window overlooking his backyard at 160 Lyle Street in Winnipeg. An oil painting, Oakdale Place, ca. 1950, from the same period shows the view directly across to his neighbour’s house, but the house is only partially seen in From an Upstairs Window, Winter.

From an Upstairs Window, Winter is a study in formal opposites. The irregular tracery of tree limbs and their interstices is juxtaposed to the linearity of the windowsill and the geometry of the jug. Yet the outside/inside views are united by a limited palette and tonal modulations that animate both worlds. Like the interplay between the organic and geometric elements of Doc Snyder’s House, 1931, some twenty years earlier, From an Upstairs Window, Winter exhibits a harmonious balance between the natural and the abstract that characterizes this classic masterpiece. The painting is as complete a statement as FitzGerald ever made of how familiar surroundings acted as a reflection of his own quiet and contemplative spirit.