The Art Gallery of Ontario is an art museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located in the Grange Park neighbourhood of downtown Toronto, on Dundas Street West. The building complex takes up 45,000 square metres (480,000 sq ft) of physical space, making it one of the largest art museums in North America and the second-largest art museum in Toronto, after the Royal Ontario Museum. In addition to exhibition spaces, the museum also houses an artist-in-residence office and studio, dining facilities, event spaces, gift shop, library and archives, theatre and lecture hall, research centre, and a workshop.
Bertram Richard Brooker was a Canadian abstract painter. A self-taught polymath, in addition to being a visual artist, Brooker was a Governor General's Award-winning novelist, as well as a poet, screenwriter, playwright, essayist, copywriter, graphic designer, and advertising executive. A key part of the art community in Toronto, he is considered one of its "most gifted first responders".
William Raphael, born Israel Rafalsky, was a Prussian-born Canadian painter of portraits, still lifes, genre scenes and landscapes, best known for his lively scenes of the Montreal harbour and market life. He was the first Jewish professional artist to establish himself in Canada, a charter member of Montreal's Society of Canadian Artists in 1868, a member of the Ontario Society of Artists in 1879 and a charter member of the Canadian Academy of Arts in 1880.
Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald L.L. D. also known as L. L. FitzGerald was a Canadian artist and art educator. He was the only member of the Group of Seven based in western Canada. He worked almost exclusively in Manitoba. Although he accepted the Group of Seven’s invitation to become a member in 1932, FitzGerald was less concerned than the rest of the group with the promotion of a unified Canadian identity. Instead he explored his surroundings, delving deeply into the forces he felt animated and united nature in order to make “the picture a living thing.”
Frederick Arthur Verner was a Canadian painter, well-known for his paintings of the First Nations in the Canadian west and for his paintings of buffalo. His pictures of the buffalo were thought to be “a class of subject where he stands almost alone and unrivalled,” said Toronto`s The Globe in 1906. Verner set a standard in this department of art, it added in 1908.
Sir Edmund Boyd Osler was a Canadian businessman, politician and philanthropist. He was a founder and benefactor of the Royal Ontario Museum.
Paul Kane was an Irish-born Canadian painter whose paintings and especially field sketches were known as one of the first visual documents of Western indigenous life.
William Ronald Smith, known professionally as William Ronald, was an important Canadian painter, best known as the founder of the influential Canadian abstract art group Painters Eleven in 1953 and for his abstract expressionist "central image" paintings. He was the older brother of painter John Meredith (1933–2000).
George Agnew Reid was a Canadian artist, painter, influential educator and administrator. He is best known as a genre painter, but his work encompassed the mural, and genre, figure, historical, portrait and landscape subjects.
The Canadian Art Club was an artists' group established in Toronto in 1907 to advance the standards of Canadian art exhibitions and to exhibit the work of distinguished Canadian artists, particularly those who had studied abroad or lived there. It declined after the death of its co-founder Edmund Morris in 1913, ceased to exist in 1915 but was not formally dissolved till 1933.
Carl Ray was a First Nations artist who was active on the Canadian art scene from 1969 until his death in 1978. Considered primarily a Woodlands Style artist. He was a founding member of the Indian Group of Seven. He began painting when he was 30 years old.
Kent Monkman is a Canadian First Nations artist of Cree ancestry. He is a member of the Fisher River band situated in Manitoba's Interlake Region. Monkman lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.
Susan Andrina Ross CM, was a Canadian painter, printmaker, and illustrator from Port Arthur, Ontario who is best known for her portraits of Native and Inuit peoples as well as Arctic landscapes. Her work is valuable both for its artistry and for its historical significance since she captured many images of a passing way of life. In 2002 she was awarded the Order of Canada in the Visual Arts.
Clara Isabella Harris was a Canadian artist. She worked in the media of painting, watercolours, sculpture, sketching, and wood carving.
Kathleen "Kay" Moir Morris was a Canadian painter and member of the Beaver Hall Group.
Clara Sophia Hagarty (1871–1958) was a Canadian artist. Hagarty worked with paints and pastels. She is best known for her paintings of flowers. She was elected to the Ontario Society of Artists in 1903, the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1904. She studied in New Jersey, Paris, and the Netherlands. She spent World War I working for the Red Cross in London, and after the war worked at the Art Gallery of Toronto until 1928. She died in Toronto, Ontario in 1958.
Sydney Strickland Tully was a Canadian painter. She is known for her pastel and oil portraits, landscapes and genre pictures, and for her success in a number of exhibitions. Tully kept a studio in Toronto from 1888 until her death. Her major works include The Twilight of Life (1894), an oil painting in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Frederick Sproston Challener (1869–1959), also known as F.S. Challener, was a Canadian painter of murals as well as an easel painter of oils and watercolours and a draftsman in black-and-white and pastel. He also did illustrations for books and commercial art. He "easily ranks with the first few mural decorators in Canada", wrote Newton MacTavish, author of The Fine Arts in Canada
Curtis Williamson was a Canadian visual artist known for his portraits and figure painting; also genre and landscape. He was nicknamed "the Canadian Rembrandt" because of his dark, tonal style. Williamson was one of the founders of the Canadian Art Club, showed his work at its inaugural exhibition in 1907, and, like some of the other members, his work had a Hague school or Barbizon sensibility.
Michael Parke-Taylor is an independent art historian and curator who worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in various positions for twenty-three years, retiring as Curator of Modern Art in 2011. He has published widely and is a collector of popular culture. In 2024, he curated the retrospective exhibition and wrote the accompanying book for the exhibition Bertram Brooker: When We Awake! at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg. He lives in Toronto.
