William Blair Bruce (1859 to 1906)
About the Artist
William Blair Bruce was born in Hamilton in 1859 and is "one of the city's most famous artistic sons". He was Canada's first impressionist painter and had established his artistic reputation in Europe by the 1880s. Bruce's masterpiece, The Smiths (1894), was a portrait of workers forging a wheel and may have been intended as a tribute to Hamilton and its tire industry. Bruce married Swedish sculptress Caroline Benedicks in 1888 who not only provided him with much needed emotional and artistic support but also devoted herself to the perpetuation of her husband’s reputation. She organized many exhibitions of his works, arranged for sales and it was her generous donation of thirty-three Bruce paintings to the City of Hamilton that was to be the catalyst for the City’s first art gallery in 1914.
What Bruce wanted to exhibit was the colour and form "one sees in nature" for him, the only truth. Bruce believed his peculiar gift was the design of outdoor effects. In 1885 he wrote to his father, "How I would like to do honour to our Canada, the noble Dominion, to our ambitious little City, to the family".
The Canadian Encyclopedia
Stuart McCuaig
Climbing the Cold White Peaks:
A Survey of Artists in and from Hamilton 1910 to 1950
About the Painting:
Oil on Canvas
The Phantom Hunter, inspired by C.D. Shanly's poem "The Walker of the Snow," in which a hunter meets his death by freezing, was painted at a time when the Canadian press was calling for the establishment of a national art imbued with Canadian themes. The haunting image of the solitary trapper abandoned in the barren snowscape has become a metaphor of individual struggle as well as a pictorial touchstone of northern identity. Painted in France following a brief sojourn in Hamilton, the work was accepted for the 1888 Paris Salon, where the artist hoped to make a "Canadian" mark on the international audience. In correspondence with his mother, he reported his pride in the acceptance of this subject at the Paris Salon. It was Bruce's second start as an artist in Paris. In 1881, he had studied at the Académie Julian and at Barbizon, a village south of Paris, but his work from this period was lost in a shipwreck in the St. Lawrence in 1885 enroute to Toronto. Bruce suffered a nervous breakdown due to this tragedy but a year later was ready to start all over again. Returning to France in 1887, he spent time in Giverny, where, in the company of other Canadian, American and Scandinavian artists, he painted en plein air, directly from nature, using Impressionist techniques to render the landscape. While the painting did not receive the attention abroad Bruce had hoped for, its subsequent destiny in Canada has established Bruce as one of this country's most important late nineteenth-century painters.
