Frederick Varley

“The artist’s job is to unlock fetters and release spirit, to tear to pieces and recreate so forcefully that… the imagination of the onlooker is awakened and completes within himself the work of art.”  F.H. Varley

Varley was born in Sheffield, England on January 2^nd 1881.  He emigrated to Canada in 1912 to work as a commercial artist in Toronto; his childhood friend Arthur Lismer (also a member of the Group of Seven) had encouraged him to move to Toronto.  Frederick was appointed an official war artist during World War 1 by Lord Beaverbrook, his paintings of combat are based on his experiences at the front.  It is quoted by him that he became deeply disturbed by what he saw:  “We’d be healthier to forget (the war), and that we never can.  We are forever tainted with its abortiveness and its cruel drama”. In 1920, he was a founding member of the Group of Seven. He did not share the Group's enthusiasm for the Ontario landscape, however, and during the early 1920s attempted to make a living as a portraitist.