Edmund Morris

Edmund Montague Morris (1871–1913), was a Canadian painter and pastelist who recorded the First Nations in paint and photographs and collected their artifacts (today in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto along with 60 portraits by him which formerly belonged to the Ontario government collection). He was the son of Alexander Morris, Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. He both co-founded the Canadian Art Club and authored an early book on Canadian art, Art in Canada: the early painters (1911?).

Biography

Morris was born on December 18, 1871, in Perth, Ontario. He lived at Fort Garry (Winnipeg), Manitoba, from 1872 to 1878 and then moved to Toronto where he attended Toronto Collegiate Institute. He later studied art under William Cruikshank. In the United States, he studied at the Art Students League of New York. In Europe he attended the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1893–1895).

Morris settled in Toronto in 1896. His contemporaries included William Brymner, Maurice Cullen and Edmond Dyonnet, among others. He won a bronze medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y. in 1901 for his Girls in a Poppy Field (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto).

In 1905, Morris held a solo show in Ottawa featuring portraits of Plains chiefs that he painted from photographs. In 1906 he was invited to accompany the government expedition headed by Duncan Campbell Scott to the James Bay district to negotiate Treaty no. 9 with the Cree and Ojibwe. While there, he made many portraits in pastel of the Indian leaders at the event. He continued making annual summer trips through 1910 to Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, making sympathetic and accurate pastel portraits of the indigenous people due to his genuine interest in them. The result was a series of portraits of unique value. In 1909, he had a major exhibition of 55 Indian paintings and artifacts in Toronto at the Canadian Art Club.