
Frank Black’s “Back Street Bermuda”, circa 1932
Click the image to see it much larger.
It was a really pleasant surprise to get a couple of comments on my March 2007 post on Canadian artists who aren’t well known beyond the national borders. And the comments weren’t about the brighter of these dimmer lights but about the least known of them all, Frank Black.
Frank Charles Black was a British-born, Toronto-based artist who was an associate of some members of the Group of Seven and shared their initial profession — commercial art — and their disdain for it. He retired from the business as soon as he could and moved to Georgetown, Ontario, just west of Toronto, where he taught art basics to pay the bills but finally got down to painting what he wanted to paint. He died in 1988.
The readers’ requests for more information prodded me to try and get in touch with John Sommer, proprietor of Gallery House Sol in Georgetown, which is also the town where I grew up. John knew Black fairly well, whereas I had only met the artist once, around 1976. Unfortunately House Sol doesn’t have an online address, and the local library, who I know could put us in touch, didn’t respond to my email. Georgetown does seem to be in a timewarp that way.
However, both the National Gallery of Canada and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts responded quickly and helpfully. The latter has no Frank Black works in its collection, but at least offered a list of titles from its archives:
“Georgian Bay, Minnieog”, 1922
“Broken Ice”, 1922
“Old and New”, 1930
“Midsummer Street”, 1930
“The Mill Road”, 1930
“Landscape Bermuda”, 1931
“Old Trading Ship, Bermuda”, 1933
“Near Caledon”, 1934
“Minnieog” in the first entry could be a typo, since I’ve found no references to such a place in Ontario’s Georgian Bay area. There is, however, a Minnie Rock there. Other than that, the list indicates when Black was painting in Bermuda, which was central to the queries I had from both readers.
One of them, a resident of Lansdowne, Ontario, owns the painting reproduced at the top of this post, “Back Street Bermuda”. Her grandmother, she reported, had lived in Georgetown and while there bought a handful of Frank Black paintings. A label on the back of “Bermuda” includes accreditation by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
The National Gallery sent me by regular mail a package of photocopied newspaper clippings about Black, among which I was astonished to find two articles that I’d written while I was with Georgetown’s now-defunct Halton Hills Herald. I had no idea I was in the national archives (apart from police records).
Alas, neither of the galleries was able to supply digital images of any of Black’s work or confirm that any of his paintings had been at some point part of their collections (and the Art Gallery of Ontario is in the midst of a revamp for the next few months). But from the clippings, I’ve at least been able to prepare a short biography and extract some photos. The photocopied newspaper pictures are in rough shape, which I’m afraid still shows through in my Photoshopped versions in this post. See the rest.