F.H. Varley: Landscapes, Portraits and the Group of Seven
I came across this painting by artist Frederick Varley and set about finding out more of his work. The movement and light captured in Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay (1921) is so real. It reminds me of my time studying in Falmouth, Cornwall. Seeing the storms from the beach and walking the coastal path, where the light is indescribable.
Frederick Horsman Varley was born in Sheffield in 1881 and began studying at the Sheffield School of Art when he was just 11. He later studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp before emigrating to Canada in 1912, where he found work as a commercial artist in Toronto.
Although Varley became famous as one of the Group of Seven, he actually thought of himself first and foremost as a portrait painter. I am drawn to his landscapes though, and the wonderful range of colour he used in them.
During the First World War Varley was commissioned as an official Canadian war artist and travelled to France and Belgium in 1918. What he witnessed affected him deeply. His war paintings are very different from the beauty of his landscapes, but they have the same extraordinary ability to create atmosphere.
For What? is particularly haunting. A lone gravedigger stands beside a cart filled with bodies collected from the battlefield. There is no heroism here, just an incredibly bleak question about what all that suffering was for.
Back in Canada, Varley became a founding member of the Group of Seven in 1920. The group became known for painting the Canadian landscape in a bold new way, but Varley's portraits and figures always made him a little different from the others.
In 1926 Varley moved west to Vancouver to teach at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts. The landscape became increasingly important in his work there, and his paintings grew freer and more intensely coloured.
His colour palette, for people as well as landscapes, seems to return again and again to greens, pinks and purples. The Varley Art Gallery describes him as a noted colourist, and you can certainly see why. Even when the subject is quiet, the colour rarely is.
Varley's life continued to take him to unexpected places. In 1938 he travelled into the Arctic to sketch, and in 1954 he visited the Soviet Union with a small group of Canadian artists on what was billed as the first cultural exchange of the Cold War era. That same year a major retrospective of his work toured Canada.
He died in Toronto in 1969.
An interesting life, exposed to such sadness, yet I see real beauty in his work.
You can discover more about Varley's life and work at the Varley Art Gallery and Library and Archives Canada.
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