Daniel Fowler
Untitled, 1867
watercolour
29 x 39.7 cm
Purchased 1986
The oldest work in the gallery’s permanent collection, Fowler’s Untitled, is as old as Canada itself!
Trained as an artist in his native England, Fowler (1810 – 1894) immigrated to Canada in 1843 with his family to Amherst Island, near Kingston, Ontario. Soon after moving he gave up his artistic practice, devoting 15 years to farming and taking care of his family. Returning to painting in 1857 he soon established himself among Canada’s first generation of professional artists, and was admired by his peers as “one of the fathers of Canadian art.”
Fowler became a founding member of the Ontario Association of Artists (1872) and was elected a charter member of the Royal Canadian Academy (1880).
Oscar Cahen
Untitled, C.1956
gouache and oil on paper
68.4 x 87.4 cm
Purchased 1989
Oscar Cahen was born in Copenhagen Denmark in 1916 and studied art and design throughout many locations in Europe including Germany, Italy, France and Sweden. Cahen immigrated to England from Germany in 1939, before the Nazi occupation, but was forced into an internment camp in Canada because his German heritage. His artistic contacts in Canada secured his release in October, 1942, and he began working as a freelance illustrator for magazines such as Maclean’s, Chatelaine and New Liberty.
In the late 1940s he met Walter Yarwood, Harold Town and others involved in avant-garde art movement in Toronto, and Cahén. Cahén, along with Town and a number of other artists formed the group Painters Eleven, a group of influential abstract painters living in and around Toronto, who practiced together from 1954-1960. Their first exhibition, in 1954, was also the first major commercial display of abstract art in Toronto.