Frederick H. Varley

Frederick Varley was born in 1881 in Sheffield, England. He studied painting at Sheffield and Antwerp and went to work in London as a commercial illustrator. In 1912, he came to Canada, where he found himself working in the same ommercial studio as Tom Thomson. With Thomson and the others he took to painting northern Ontario landscapes, and also began to do considerable work as a portrait painter. In 1926, Varley moved to Vancouver to become Head of Drawing, Painting & Composition at the newly formed Vancouver School of Decorative & Applied Arts. In 1933, he founded his own school, the B.C. College of Arts, but this venture led him to bankruptcy in 1935, and in 1938 his marriage also collapsed. The next years were difficult for Varley, most of them spent suffering from alcoholism in Montreal. In 1945, however, he returned to Toronto and slowly began to work again. He died in Toronto in 1969.

Frederick H. Varley Images:
Stormy Weather, Geogian Bay