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York Wilson (1907–1984), also known as Ronald York Wilson, was a Canadian painter and muralist born in Toronto, Ontario. In 1949, Wilson left his career as a commercial artist to pursue his independent art practice full-time. He worked across a diversity of media including lithography, serigraphy, watercolour, acrylic, oil, gouache, ink, and charcoal. He also created tapestry designs, poetry illustrations, and small abstract collages. However, he is most well known for his murals.

Wilson attended Central Technical School in Toronto, however, he was mainly self-taught. He began his artistic career working as a commercial artist at Brigden’s Engraving House in Toronto where he was greatly influenced by artists Charles Comfort and Will Ogilvie. As his interest in art deepened, he took night classes at the Ontario College of Art and later at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In 1929, Wilson began working in Detroit where he was exposed to illustration and lettering. At this time, he was also exploring his interest in fine art, visiting museums and reading art books with his friend Ed Smith. He returned to Canada in 1930, after being laid off during the Great Depression. His paintings between 1930 and 1950 were mainly representational and depicted theatrical, urban, and social realist scenes.

1949 was a pivotal moment in Wilson’s career. At this time, he took his first trip to Mexico to visit the artist’s colony of San Miguel de Allende. The experience inspired him to abandon his successful career as a commercial artist to pursue his independent practice. He made later visits to Mexico in 1950, 1953, and 1955 where he met artists such as David Alfaro Aiquerios and Rico Lebrun who introduced Wilson to new synthetic paints and sparked his interest in mural painting. Throughout the 1950s, Wilson painted his most famous murals in Toronto, including those found at the O’Keefe Centre (now Sony Centre), the Imperial Oil Building, and the Bell Telephone Building. In the late 1950s, he began painting more abstractly, briefly turning to geometric abstraction in the 1960s. Between 1949 and the late 1960s, Wilson travelled to many destinations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and he felt that his travels were an important part of his creative process.

Wilson obtained one of his most significant commissions in 1981 when the Uffizi Gallery in Florence commissioned him to create a self-portrait. His work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in collections at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, among others. Active in the art community, Wilson was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Canadian Group of Painters.

After his death in 1984, a large donation was made by Wilson’s widow, Lela, and her second husband, Maxwell Henderson, to establish the York Wilson Endowment Award for the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2011, the York Wilson Foundation was established to maintain the artist’s legacy. The foundation donated over 850 works of art to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, making it the largest collection of Wilson’s work.