Jack Humphrey
(1901–)
(–1967)
Jack Humphrey
1901–1967
Jack Humphrey (1901–1967), born in Saint John, New Brunswick, was a Canadian landscape and figure painter, known for his watercolour paintings of cityscapes and harbour scenes that convey the natural disorder of buildings, streets, and boats. He was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters, which succeeded the by-then disbanded Group of Seven.
In the 1920s, Humphrey studied under Philip Hale at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and under Charles Hawthorne at the National Academy of Design in New York. He furthered his studies under Charles Hawthorne's Cape Cod School of Art before moving to Europe from 1929–1930. While there, Humphrey studied first at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and then at the Hans Hofmann school in Munich. He also visited Italy, Holland, Belgium, and England, becoming both steeped in a cosmopolitan sensibility and a sense of his Canadian subjectivity. Returning to Saint John during the Great Depression, Humphrey often focused on working-class children as the subject for his portraits. These moody character studies often conveyed the hardships of daily life in Saint John.
Perhaps owing to an awakened sense of national identity, Humphrey helped found the Canadian Group of Painters (C.G.P.) in 1933. The group responded to the National Gallery’s perceived bias in only representing the work of the Group of Seven in its exhibitions and internationally, and sought to foster closer cooperation between Canadian artists and foster Canadian artistic expression.
By the mid-1930s, Humphrey’s modernist approach to both figurative and abstract work was achieving recognition outside New Brunswick. He travelled to Mexico in 1938, making over 100 watercolours and drawings that formed a significant part of his oeuvre. He was an unofficial war painter during World War II, bringing his characteristic pensive style to paint portraits of soldiers. A return trip to Paris and Brittany in 1952 drew Humphrey’s interest toward abstract and non-objective compositions in gouache and oil landscapes.
In addition to being part of the Canadian Group of Painters, Humphrey was also a member of the Eastern Group of Painters, Contemporary Arts Society, Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, Canadian Society of Graphic Arts, and International Association of Plastic Arts; and a Fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of New Brunswick in 1951. In 1966-1967, he received a retrospective exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada that toured across Canada.