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Painting our new nation
Dark clouds hover in his paintings, and you can almost feel the wild wind blow. Homer Watson wasn’t interested in painting pretty pictures. He looked around at the rough Ontario countryside near Kitchener, where he grew up, and painted the land of the pioneer settlers just the way he saw it.
Watson had taught himself to paint, so maybe that’s why he saw things his own way. In 1880, when he was 25, he got his big break in the art world. That year the Marquess of Lorne, Canada’s governor general, bought one of Watson’s paintings as a gift for his mother-in-law, Queen Victoria. The Queen loved the painting, and suddenly everyone wanted to see Watson’s work.
1880 was a big year for Canadian art, too. The governor general bought Watson’s painting at the first exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. The Academy’s art collection was the beginning of the new National Gallery of Canada. One hundred twenty-five years later, Canada Post honoured both Watson and the Gallery with a pair of stamps showing two of Watson’s landscapes from the Gallery’s collections, the majestic Down in the Laurentides, which appears on a domestic rate (50¢) stamp, and the stormy Flood Gate, on a U.S. rate (85¢) stamp. |
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