He emigrated to Canada in 1912 on the advice of another Sheffield native (and future Group of Seven member), Arthur Lismer, and found work at the Grip Ltd. design firm in Toronto, Ontario and afterwards at Rous & Mann.

[6]Varley's Some Day the People Will Return, shown at Burlington House in London and at the Canadian War Memorials Exhibition, is a large canvas depicting a war-ravaged cemetery, suggesting that even the dead cannot escape the destruction.

It is one of the few official Canadian First World War paintings that does not hide the reality of battlefield death in images of ruins, blasted trees, and battle detritus.

[9] He left in 1936 due to his experiences with depression, and two years later joined fellow artist Terry M. Shortt, the Royal Ontario Museum ornithologist, on a trip to the Arctic in 1938.

In 1954, along with a handful of artists including Eric Aldwinckle, he visited the Soviet Union on the first cultural exchange of the Cold War.

Kathleen nurtured Varley’s later artistic career by setting up a studio for him in the basement of her ancestral home, now the McKay Art Centre located at 197 Main Street Unionville.

[11] He was buried alongside other members of the Original Seven at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection grounds in Kleinburg, Ontario.

The stamp was designed by Pierre-Yves Pelletier based on an oil painting Vera, (1931) by Frederick Horsman Varley in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.