Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour
Using local materials and chemicals they certainly approximated the watercolour medium in some of their pigments and dyes while really not having any practical reason for exploring any inherent transparent qualities.
Historically art-trained officers or cartographers were dispatched by both the French and British governments to assist in the preparation of vitally important maps of these newly claimed lands and to record geographical features.
Prior to the invention of the camera, watercolour portrait miniatures, on vellum or ivory, were a staple in the homes of Canada's urban elite.
While Jacobi, Way and O'Brien and others involved themselves in the 1880 founding of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts there had long been demands, especially in Montreal, for the formation of a specifically medium based society.
While several of these early societies did survive for brief periods it was on November 11, 1925, that a group of like-minded artists met at the historic Arts & Letters Club of Toronto and founded the CSPWC/SCPA.
The reality was that the emerging artist got public recognition by jury acceptance to exhibit with his or her better-known peer group, their fame adding lustre by association.
As one of the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Canada was, unknown to itself at the time, seeking to establish its own identity separate from its earlier colonial rulers.
As painters across the country fanned out into their respective rural, backwoods and northern spaces, it was the medium of watercolour an easily transportable and light material which lent itself so readily to the newly popular subject matter.
While many artists did use watercolours as an on-site sketching medium, many used those same paintings as source material for often larger and more highly finished works on canvas that they produced in their home studios.
It was this very ill-informed perception that was behind the very founding of the Society as an exhibiting body where the individual art pieces would not be compared to neighbouring work in other less challenging materials.
Beginning in the 1930s, the National Gallery of Canada was instrumental in assisting the CSPWC/SCPA with a series of high-profile international exchange exhibitions with societies in New Zealand, Brazil, France, Great Britain and the US.
Finding that a sizable percentage of the exhibition program was taken up with the annual shows of regional and national arts groups, the new curatorial staff repositioned themselves.
Regional galleries, libraries and university campuses hosted the annual exhibitions and a new sense of national identity was found within the Society.
While the annual search for a venue created much work for a volunteer membership it did help develop a real sense of comradeship that has continued to the present day.
While a number of other media-based institutions started to falter during this difficult period the CSPWC/SCPA worked very hard to keep itself viable and the annual juried show its "raison d'être".
Working with Visual Arts Ontario,[2] the Society was able to obtain permanent office space in the 1970s and was able to organize the first of a number of educational seminars that have evolved into today's popular National Watercolour Symposiums.
Celebrating the 75th anniversary in 2000 with its regular Annual "Open Water" exhibition, the CSPWC/SCPA unveiled the first Julius Griffith award given to "an elected member who has made an outstanding and sustained contribution to the Society".
As the year came to a close, a major retrospective show of the Society, "A Brush with History", was organized by the Art Gallery of Mississauga.
