James Edward Hervey MacDonald was a founding member of the Group of Seven. He was a member of the Ontario Society of Artists, the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, and was active in the Arts and Letters Club, Toronto.
MacDonald was born in Durham, England in 1873 and immigrated to Canada with his family when he was 14 years old. He studied commercial art at the Hamilton Art School and the Central Ontario School of Art and Design in Toronto. He worked as a designer at Grip Limited from 1895 to 1911 along with Tom Thomson, Arthur Lismer and John Varley. He resigned in 1912 to paint full-time, but worked as a freelance designer until 1921. From 1921 he taught at the Ontario College of Art, and became Principal in 1929.
In the fall of 1918, and again each fall for several years after that, MacDonald travelled by train to Algoma, where he made sketches for some of his most important paintings. He also travelled to the Rockies every summer beginning in 1924.
In 1931, MacDonald had a stroke, and he and his wife spent the summer of 1932 in Barbados so that he could recover. He died in Toronto November 26, 1932.
|
