Roberts Gallery Blog

CARL SCHAEFER FEATURE

Carl Schaefer was born in Hanover, Ontario in 1903 and grew up on his grandparents’ farm.  He attended the Ontario College of Art from 1921 to 1924, where he was taught by Arthur Lismer and JEH MacDonald.

Schaefer was best known for his painting of rural southwestern Ontario.  During his career he won many awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1940.  His work has been collected by most of the major public galleries in Canada.  The National Gallery of Canada acquired 105 works by Schaefer through his lifetime including oil paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints.  He is also known for his devotion to watercolour and in 1933 became a member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour.   In 1936, he became a charter member of the Canadian Group of Painters, the more expansive group of artists that formed following the Group of Seven disbanding.  

Schaefer worked as a war artist with the Royal Canadian Air Force from 1943 to 1946.  The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa has a collection of 221 paintings, sketchbooks, and war diaries.  He went on to teach at the Ontario College of Art from 1948 to 1970.

Haliburton was an area that the artist visited and sketched from the early 1930’s to the 1980’s.  This “Low Water – Lake Kushog, Haliburton” 1979 watercolour is a recognizable subject of his, starting his work with a graphite drawing and completing it in watercolour.  A dramatic sky which produced interesting areas of light and shadow would have pleased Schaefer’s eye for shapes and composition.