True North Palettes: 100 Canadian Paintings by Homer Watson
Who was Homer Watson? I have travelled countless times on the street named after famed Canadian artist Homer Watson. Little did I realize his importance until I began my intense interest in Canadian artists from that time period. Homer would go on to become one of the most celebrated landscape painters Canada produced in the nineteenth century. Largely self-taught, with only a smattering of formal instruction, Watson began exhibiting professionally in 1878 and rose to prominence with startling speed. By the time he reached his mid-twenties, collectors and critics across the country had taken notice, and his depictions of the rolling farmland, woodlots, and rivers around his native Doon had established him as one of the defining figures in Canadian art, a status he held from the 1880s right through to the outbreak of the First World War. What set Watson apart from many of his contemporaries was his refusal to treat the Canadian landscape as a mere echo of European painting traditi...
