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In
1911, at age twenty-six, Arthur Lismer joined Grip. He
had just arrived in Canada from the industrial city of
Sheffield,England.
At
the age of thirteen, Lismer won an entrance scholarship
to the Sheffield School of Art and began what was, to
most people, a seven year apprenticeship towards
becoming a silver craftsman.
Unhappy
and feeling too confined in England, he went to Antwerp
for a year and a half to study at the Academie Royal des
Beaux-Arts. At first influenced by the Barbizon
("cow") school, Lismer was later deeply moved
by the Post-Impressionist works, especially of Van Gogh
Back
in Sheffield, Lismer struggled as a commercial artist
and soon decided to head for Canada, where he had heard
commercial artists were doing extremely well. Lismer
landed a job at Grip immediately upon his arrival in
1911. He was one of the four employees, who later formed
the Group of Seven, to leave work for Rous and Mann
printing house in 1912.
Arthur
Lismer was a man of considerable energy - a gregarious,
outgoing individual, always ready with a witty or
caustic remark. Nothing delighted him more than taking a
crack at the establishment or at anything that hinted at
pretension. Speaking of Tom Thomson, he once said,
"If the country's half as stirring as Tom's
sketches seem to indicate, in Heaven's name why are so
many Canadians always talking about their stomachs,
their money?... Where's the romantic spirit, the
philosophic spirit?"
This
‘spirit' and energy made Lismer fight against the
apathy and ignorance of the public towards the world of
art. He did this by dividing his time between painting
and teaching. In 1916, he began his lifelong career in
teaching, as principal of an art school in Halifax, a
career that took him all over Canada and the world.
In his teaching, Lismer's
passion was devoted to children's art, and in his
painting, it was the Canadian landscape. In both cases,
he went at the task in a bold, colourful way.
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