| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Born in Barcheston, England, landscape and portrait artist Marmaduke Matthews attended the Cowley Diocesan School of Oxford where he studied under landscape painter Thomas Miles Richardson; he continued his education at London University. Because his parents wanted him to succeed in business, he worked for three years at a London-based German publishing and importing company.
After arriving in Toronto in 1860 at age 21 and following a four-year stay in New York, Matthews began a five-decade career as a western landscape artist that brought him acclaim across the new country of Canada. He benefited from a Canadian Pacific Railway programme that granted passes to artists to document the completion of rail construction through the Rocky Mountains; he crossed the country multiple times (1887, 1889, 1892) to create panoramas of the Rockies and the prairies. According to legend, at one point Matthews drafted his pre-painting sketches while mounted on a locomotive’s cow-catcher. His romantic portraits of nature embodied the Victorian aesthetic of exhibition watercolours, and his work was shown at the 1893 World’s Fair and at exhibitions in Canada and the United States.
Numerous public and private collections house Matthews’s work, including those of the Vancouver City Museum, the Glenbow Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada.
A founding member of the Royal Canadian Academy, Matthews served for a decade as its secretary (1880 – 1890), and also helped found the Ontario Society of Artists, for which he served as vice president, president, and secretary.
With Alexander Jardin, he helped create Toronto’s Wychwood Park, an artist colony on a tract of land where he once lived, which has become an affluent neighbourhood west of Bathurst Street. He died in Toronto in 1913. |