Description

pp. 208, chronology, index to paintings and drawings, and notes. Many color plates throughout. Book in vg condition, binding clean and tight, brown boards show only minimal shelfwear on head and foot of spine. Dustjacket is not corner clipped. “This is the first major book celebrating the art of Frederick H. Varley, Canada’s greatest portrait artist and innovative member of our most famous collection of landscape painters, the Group of Seven. His best-known painting, ‘Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay’ has been a symbol of the Group of Seven, and is, according to A.Y. Jackson, one of the three greatest paintings in the history of Canadian art. Nevertheless, Varley’s greatest achievement as an artist, is in his ability to portray the essential oneness of man and nature, the relationship between the figure and the landscape. As Joyce Zemans says in her historical and aesthetic appreciation of Varley’s art, ‘he sought in nature the human experience, believing that ‘the mind surely only exists woven through the fabric of all things.’ This book is a tribute to Frederick Varley’s achievements as portraitist, war artist, and interpreter of nature. Joyce Zemans contributes an art historian’s discussion of the progress of Varley’s work from traditional English lanscapes to the height of his achievements as an artist. She discusses the greatest of Varley’s works in detail showing relationships of paintings to one another and to sketches and studies as well as the minor sketches.