George Douglas Pepper

George Douglas Pepper

George Douglas Pepper, painter (b at Ottawa 25 Feb 1903; d at Toronto 1 Oct 1962). He studied under J.E.H. MACDONALD and J.W. Beatty in Toronto, and then in Paris and Italy (1924-25). He was strongly influenced by the GROUP OF SEVEN and his sense of line and rhythmic pattern produced many works in the 1920s and 1930s sympathetic to the Group's approach to Canadian landscape. Still, he forfeited none of his own originality in arrangement and perspective, as in Totem Poles, Kitiwanga (1930). Pepper served as an official war artist in WWII and helped illustrate many subsequent publications about the war. He painted several commissions for the Canadian government and on its behalf spent 3 months with his wife, artist Kathleen Daly, studying Inuit art in the eastern Arctic in 1960. Pepper taught at the Ontario College of Art and the Banff School of Fine Arts. He was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters (1933) and was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1957.