Fred varley biography

Varley saw art as a spiritual vocation. His interest in the figure as well as landscape set him apart from other members of the Group of Seven, of which he was a founding member in 1920. One of Varley’s most famous works is Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay (1921), painted after a summer at Georgian Bay, yet he was primarily a figure and portrait painter.

After living in Ontario for a number of years, Varley moved to Vancouver, BC in 1926 where he became Head of the Department of Drawing and Painting at the School of Decorative and Applied Arts in Vancouver at the invitation of Charles Hepburn Scott. He remained in this position from 1926 until 1933. He left British Columbia in 1936 due to his experiences with depression, and two years later joined fellow artists on a trip to the Arctic in 1938. In 1954, along with a handful of artists including Eric Aldwinckle, he visited the Soviet Union on the first cultural exchange of the Cold War.

He died in Toronto in 1969 and was buried alongside other members of the Original Seven at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection grounds in Kleinburg, Ontario.

Frederick H. Varley, self-portrait, 1919

BIOGRAPHY

Frederick Varley, like his colleague Arthur Lismer, was a native of Sheffield, England and studied there and in Antwerp, before immigrating to Canada in 1912. Through Lismer, he found work at the commercial art companies of Grip Limited and, later, Rous and Mann, where he met Tom Thomson and the artist who would subsequently from the Group of Seven. While he was excited by his first sketching trip to Algonquin Park with Thomson, Lismer and A.Y. Jackson, Varley did not at that time embrace landscape painting with the zeal of the others. In fact, he was more fixed on establishing his career as a portraitist, and following his experience as a war artist, he returned to Toronto and secured commissions from members of the Toronto art establishment. Only during Varley’s 10-year sojourn in Vancouver, where he moved in 1926 to accept a teaching position at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, did the magnificent scale of the mountains, beaches and vast skies inspire an exploration of landscape painting. Although the Vancouver years were fraught with financial difficulties for Varley, they were also a time of joy and artistic growth. Writing years later of his passion for the West Coast landscape, Fred Varley said, “British Colombia is heaven…It trembles within me and pains me with its wonder as, when a child, I first awakened to the song of the earth”.

His friendships with artist Jock Macdonald and photographer John Vanderpant deepened his interest in spiritual theories of creativity whose seeds had been sown in Toronto through his contact with Lawren Harris. In 1936 he wrote, “ The artist’s job is to unlock fetters and release spirit, to tear to pieces and re-create so forcefully that…the imagination of the onlooker is awakened and completes within himself the work of art”. He died in Toronto in 196

Member of the Canadian Group of Seven

Frederick Horsman Varley (January 2, 1881 – September 8, 1969) was a member of the Canadian Group of Seven.

Career

Early life

Varley was born in Sheffield, England, in 1881, the son of Lucy (Barstow) and Samuel James Smith Varley the 7th. He began his art training there in 1892, at the age of 11, studied art in Sheffield (1892-1899) and attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp (1900-1902), Belgium, while he worked on the docks. He emigrated to Canada in 1912 on the advice of another Sheffield native (and future Group of Seven member), Arthur Lismer, and found work at the Grip Ltd. design firm in Toronto, Ontario and afterwards at Rous & Mann.

War artist

Beginning in January 1918, he served in the First World War with C.W. Simpson, J.W. Beatty and Maurice Cullen. Varley came to the attention of Lord Beaverbrook, who arranged for him to be commissioned as an official war artist. He accompanied Canadian troops in the Hundred Days offensive from Amiens, France to Mons, Belgium. His paintings of combat are based on his experiences at the front. Although he had been enthusiastic to travel to France as a war artist, he became deeply disturbed by what he saw, saying:

We’d be healthier to forget [the war], and that we never can. We are forever tainted with its abortiveness and its cruel drama.

Varley's Some Day the People Will Return, shown at Burlington House in London and at the Canadian War Memorials Exhibition, is a large canvas depicting a war-ravaged cemetery, suggesting that even the dead cannot escape the destruction.

In Varley's painting For What? (1918), a single gravedigger takes a rest from his labours, a cart full of bodies beside him. It is one of the few official Canadian First World War paintings that does not hide the reality of battlefield death in images of rui

F.H. VARLEY
1881 - 1969

Of all the members of The Group of Seven, Frederick Varley was the most reckless in his life and personality. His moves to various parts of the country seemed predicated on the hope that life would be more fulfilling in a new environment. Not solely interested in landscape, he was fascinated with the human form, whether as a portrait, a facial study, or a figure in the landscape, and he has a lasting reputation as both a landscapist and a portrait artist.

Born in Sheffield, England, Varley studied - as did his childhood friend Arthur Lismer - at the Sheffield School of Art and at the Antwerp Academy, in Antwerp, Belgium. In Antwerp, Varley had a reputation of being a heavy drinker and leading a rather bohemian life. From Antwerp, he returned to London, where he almost starved trying to support himself as an illustrator. Four years later, on his return to Yorkshire, he married and fathered two children. In 1912, Lismer once again met up with Varley - who this time was depressed and struggling to support his family. Lismer persuaded him to come to Canada, where he found work first at Grip Ltd. and then at Rous and Mann where other Grip artists, such as Tom Thomson and Franklin Carmichael, had already gone.

Through Varley's friendship with Lismer, his employment, and his membership in the Arts and Letters Club, he became part of a circle of artists that included J.E.H. MacDonald and Lawren Harris. He found the artistic life in Toronto exciting, but he was often a difficult person to get along with because of his temperamental moods and rather unconventional ways. He did, however, find a close friend in Tom Thomson, who was like him in spirit. They went on weekend excursions, but rarely sketched together as Varley preferred people to trees for subject matter.

At first Varley concentrated on portraits and established himself as a painter of Toronto's elite society. Although this brought him much needed income, he d