Goodridge Roberts was born September 24, 1904, in Barbados where his parents were on holiday from Fredericton. He was a Canadian painter best known for his landscapes of Quebec hills and fields. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal from 1923 until 1925, where he won all the prizes during his first year as a student. In 1926 he went to New York and studied at the Art Students League. In 1929 he returned to Fredericton where he worked for a year as a draftsman with the provincial forestry service. In 1930 he moved to Ottawa. He organized a class at the Ottawa Art Association, where he exhibited his work, and opened a summer art school in Wakefield, Quebec. Roberts would spend his summers painting in a number of different regions of Eastern Canada, including Georgian Bay, the Laurentians, Eastern Townships and Charlevoix.
In 1932, Roberts held his first solo exhibition at Montreal's Arts Club. He became first resident artist at Queen's University in Kingston, got married, then moved to Montreal four years later. He joined up with Ernst Neumann to open the Roberts-Neumann School of Art. In 1938 he had his first major exhibition at W. Scott and Sons and became a charter member of the Eastern Group of Painters and the Contemporary Arts Society a year later. He taught at the Art Association of Montreal for the better part of a decade, with a two-year gap during World War II, when he was stationed in England as an official war artist. He was elected a member of both the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour and the Canadian Society of Graphic Art. In 1953 Roberts received a fellowship to paint in Europe, and spent several months in Paris, Italy and on the Cote d'Azur. He became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (1956). In 1959, he was appointed the first artist-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick.
From 1960 to 1974, Goodridge Roberts exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Tate Gallery and the Commonwealth Institute in London, England and the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67, as well as many solo exhibitions in private galleries across Canada. In 1969, The National Gallery of Canada held a retrospective show of his work, a rare honour for a living artist. That same year he was made a member of the Order of Canada. He died in Montreal at the age of 69. Following his death, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, held a retrospective show.
|
