William Ronald Smith RCA (August 13, 1926 – February 9, 1998), known professionally as William Ronald, was an important Canadian painter, best known as the founder of the influential Canadian abstract art group Painters Eleven in 1953 and for his abstract expressionist "central image" paintings.
[3] With artist friends of a like mind, he founded Painters Eleven in 1953, the first abstract painting group in Ontario.
Despite the success of the group, Ronald resented the city's general attitude toward its artists and moved to the United States in 1957, eventually becoming an American citizen.
[4] He was accepted by critics, collectors, and artists such as Franz Kline, and enjoyed a multi-year period of success.
He gained some notoriety for his portrait series of Canadian Prime Ministers, a pioneering highly abstracted portrayal of heads of government opened by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Toronto in 1984 at the Art Gallery of Ontario.