Close to Home: Homer Watson’s Canadian Landscape Painting

Homer Ransford Watson (1855–1936) was above all a painter of rural landscapes, and was especially devoted to places that he knew intimately. He has often been credited as the first nineteenth-century artist to portray these settings as specifically Canadian, rather than as a pastiche of European influences. A self-taught painter, his art documents the centrality of the pioneer legacy to Ontario’s sense of historical identity and crucially emphasizes the importance of environmentalist approaches to the natural world. For more on Homer Watson read Brian Foss’s Homer Watson: Life & Work.

Brian Foss is a teacher, a freelance curator, and the director of Carleton University’s School for Studies in Art and Culture. His most recent project was the award-winning 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group, co-curated with Jacques Des Rochers for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015).