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Frederick Cross was born in Exeter, England in 1881 and immigrated to Canada in 1906. An engineer by trade, he worked as a superintendent of operations and Maintenance, CPR Department of Natural Resources, in Lethbridge for a time in the 1930s. He was an accomplished painter in the British watercolour tradition and had something of an international reputation, although not much is known regarding his painting career in Canada. It is recorded, however that one of his paintings was purchased by the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh in 1933 after it appeared there in an exchange exhibition organized by the National Gallery. In 1938 one of his works was selected for a second exchange exhibition that travelled to venues throughout Scotland. He was said to have provided transportation for A.Y. Jackson during one of his trips to the foothills during the thirties, and was a charter member of the Alberta Society of Artists and a member of the Canadian Society of painters in Watercolour. He painted mostly rural landscapes that were notable for their low horizons and large expanses of sky, making the Western Canadian prairies an attractive subject for his art.
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