ARTIST PROFILE
A painter,
watercolourist, draughtsman and printmaker, Jack Humphrey brought a modernist
approach to both figurative and abstract work inspired by his native Saint John. With
particular attention to form, composition and colour, he created cityscapes and
harbour scenes that convey the natural disorder of buildings, streets and
boats. His portraits of working class children are moody character studies that
convey both the hardships of the Depression, and the resilience and hopefulness
of youth.
Jack Weldon
Humphrey was born in Saint John,
in 1901. He studied at the School of the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston,
under Phillip Hale and painting at the National Academy of Design, the Arts
Students League, New York, and Charles
Hawthorn's Cape Cod
School. He was a Tiffany
Foundation student at Oyster Bay, Long Island,
1927. In 1929 he studied in Paris with Andre
Lhote, and at the Grande Chaumiere Academy
and in Munich at the Hans Hofmann
School until 1930. He
also travelled in Italy, Holland, Belgium,
and England.
Humphrey
returned to Saint John
in the summer of 1930, several months into the Depression, and started painting
the city and its inhabitants, creating still lifes, and doing field sketches in
the region. In 1933, he spent several months in Vancouver,
Toronto and Montreal, exhibiting with the Canadian Group
of Painters at the Art Gallery of Toronto, and befriending John Lyman, Jori
Smith and Jean Palardy. By the mid-1930s, Humphrey was achieving recognition
outside New Brunswick.
In 1938, he travelled to Mexico,
where he made over 100 watercolours and drawings, which he exhibited the
following year at Toronto's
Picture Loan Society. During the war, he was commissioned as an unofficial war
artist to paint portraits of soldiers. In 1952, Humphrey returned to France on a fellowship, spending a year in Paris and two months in Brittany. The majority of his life was spent
in Saint John
where he was a full-time painter. In 1966, the Beaverbrook Art
Gallery organized a
retrospective exhibition of the artist's work which was circulated across the
country by the National Gallery of Canada.
Humphrey was a
member of the Canadian Group of Painters, Eastern Group of Painters,
Contemporary Arts Society, Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour,
Canadian Society of Graphic Arts, and International Association of Plastic
Arts, and a Fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters. He was
awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of New Brunswick
in 1951.
From his
obituary in 1967 -
A shy,
retiring man who began drawing critics' praise in the 1930's... Critics on an
international level praised his 'nostalgic still life', his fusing of the
figurative with the abstract in black sky landscapes', his master watercolour
and portrait techniques'. And from renowned critic Robert Ayre came this
summary: "He does not play games with physics but he is absorbed in what
the eye sees and the pleasure in it... he is single-minded in his explorations
and he has a lonely and uncompromising distinction".
