Doris McCarthyLife & Work

One of Canada’s pre-eminent landscape painters, Doris McCarthy (1910–2010) had a career that spanned the Great Depression and the Second World War, playing a critical role in understandings of the nation’s twentieth-century art world. In Doris McCarthy: Life & Work, author John G. Hatch explores McCarthy’s extraordinary trajectory, from her childhood in Toronto, to her weekly art lessons with Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer (1885–1969), to her receipt of a full-time scholarship to the Ontario College of Art—a pivotal event that led to her decision to become an artist, and to her proclamation: “I never looked back.” With firm resolve and a sense of adventure, McCarthy went on to become a celebrated artist, an influential educator, a prolific traveller, and an esteemed writer.

Doris McCarthy: Life & Work traces the career of the only Canadian landscape artist to work in every part of the country, forging a new vision for the genre that was distinct from the Group of Seven tradition. It addresses the components of McCarthy’s masterful talent and prodigious output, which led to the creation of more than five thousand works over the course of her eighty-year career. McCarthy’s continuously evolving style is explored through considerations of her constant experimentation with different media, her adaption of innovative artistic approaches, and her remarkable ability to balance representation and abstraction—all of which has resulted in a body of work as vast, varied, and visually rich as this country’s
natural vistas.