Ronald York Wilson
Portrait of Hedley Rainnie, 1944
Oil on canvas
76.2 x 61 cm
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. O.S. Pokorny, Sarnia, Ontario, 1980
Ronald York Wilson was born in Toronto in 1907 and studied commercial art at Central Technical School. Wilson was best known for his commissioned murals, including those for McGill University’s library (Montréal, 1954) and the Imperial Oil Building (Toronto, 1957).
The Portrait of Hedley Rainnie was painted during a meeting of the Ontario Association of Artists, where the theme was ‘Artists Paint Each Other.’ “Two portraits of unusual interest are Hedley Rainnie’s of York Wilson, and York Wilson’s of Hedley Rainnie. Both are informal, each quite different in treatment from the other, both clever, intimately alive.”