[1] On 4 April 1858 he married Anne Maria Sayer in Forest Hill, London, describing himself as an artist on his marriage certificate.

Very soon after his marriage he moved with his wife and parents to Stanstead, Lower Canada, where his grandmother had lost her husband two years earlier.

[4] Over time Fraser's art department grew to employ a large staff that coloured photographs, retouched negatives and painted backgrounds.

[8] In Toronto, Fraser employed young painters such as Horatio Walker, Homer Watson and Frederick Arthur Verner to provide high-quality artistic work.

Fraser was employed as art supervisor by the company, which had 100 employees working in a large building on the exhibition grounds.

The founders were Fraser, J. W. Bridgman, Robert Ford Gagen, James Hoch, Marmaduke Matthews, Charles Stuart Millard and Thomas Mower Martin.

The society held its first exhibition on 14 April 1873 at the Notman and Fraser premises, recently built for the firm.

The press paid most attention to the work of Fraser, Lucius Richard O'Brien and Frederick Arthur Verner.

[8] In February 1877 Fraser again became a member of the OSA, and in summer of 1877 went by rail on a sketching trip to New Brunswick, where his work in the Restigouche River estuary, Bay of Chaleur (at present-day Dalhousie), and along the Gaspe coast of Quebec received interest and acclaim from locals, capturing breathtaking landscapes.

In May 1878 he submitted a large number of oils and watercolors from his sketches to the OSA exhibition, where he received much praise for his work.

[12] In the summer he returned to the east coast to make sketches for the Picturesque Canada project edited by George Monro Grant, but the publishers rejected his submissions.

[8] William Cornelius Van Horne of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was an art connoisseur, and gave commissions to professional artists including Fraser and Lucius Richard O'Brien to make paintings of the Rockies for exhibitions promoting the CPR.

[15] Early in 1885 Fraser moved to Boston to join his wife and daughters, leaving his sons to run the photographic business.

[8] Early in 1886 Van Horne gave Fraser a commission to paint three large watercolours from photographs of the Rocky Mountains.

[13] In the spring on 1888 Fraser returned to Britain, visited Scotland and Kent, then worked on his pictures in London until his health failed in the summer of 1889.

[12] Fraser's early work as a tinter of small head and shoulders studies for Notman is skillful and sensitive, giving the impression of miniature paintings.

[1] One his first known landscapes was the picturesque and romantic Crossing the ice at Pointe de Lévy in Quebec City (1866), which showed that he was already an accomplished artist.

[16] Two of his oils from 1873, September afternoon, Eastern Townships and A shot in the dawn, Lake Scugog resemble the work of the Pre-Raphaelite painters popular in Britain at the time.