Morris, Edmund Montague

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Jean S. McGill, “MORRIS, EDMUND MONTAGUE,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/morris_edmund_montague_14E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Artist and author; b. 18 Dec. 1871 in Perth, Ont., youngest child of Alexander Morris and Margaret Cline; d. unmarried about 21 Aug. 1913 near Portneuf, Que., and was buried in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto.
    • Edmund Morris was born into a prominent Ontario family. As a child he lived in Winnipeg, where his father was first a judge and then lieutenant governor. The family returned to Ontario in 1878, and Edmund later attended Toronto Collegiate Institute. After working briefly for the architectural firm Darling and Curry, he switched to art and in January 1890 began studies with Toronto artist William Cruikshank. The following year he went to the Art Students’ League in New York. He studied in Paris between 1893 and 1896, first at the Académie Julian and later at the École des Beaux-Arts. Summers were spent painting in Scotland, France, and Holland.
    • Financially independent through family inheritances, Morris began about 1900 to devote his energies to the cause of Canadian art. He arranged for works by himself and others to be sent to the International Exhibition held at Glasgow in 1901. He himself won a bronze medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., that fall for his Girls in a poppy field. He was elected to the Ontario Society of Artists in 1905 but resigned two years later to help form the Canadian Art Club, established to give Canadian artists greater opportunity to exhibit their work at home. From 1909 he also served on the council of the nascent Art Museum of Toronto (later the Art Gallery of Toronto).
    • The following year Morris was commissioned by the Ontario government to accompany the party, headed by Scott, that travelled through northern Ontario to negotiate Treaty No.9. He was to make portraits of as many native leaders as he could. For these portraits he used pastels, which he found to be an excellent medium for depicting a subject who might pose awhile and then suddenly walk away. It was his first direct contact with native peoples, and he was appalled at the conditions under which they lived. He subsequently went with a party of natives to Nipigon country, where he sketched the wilderness landscape.
    • Edmund Morris is known principally for his striking portraits of native peoples, a record of the last generation to remember life before European settlement. A contemporary reviewer of his broadly handled landscapes praised the “varied and elusive manifestations of light . . . constantly shifting play of colour; the brilliant skies.” More recently a critic, Geoffrey Simmins, has written of one work that it is “among the most advanced landscape paintings executed during these years by any Canadian artist.” The promise shown in his landscapes was cut short by his early death.
  • Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=8642
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/168913082/edmund-montague-morris