William Walton Armstrong

William Walton Armstrong was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1916 during the period when Canada's famous Group of Seven painters were producing their historic Algonquin Park paintings. His mother's family had held United Empire Loyalist property in the Toronto district since the American Revolution. They were eminently practical people who wished he would choose to be a schoolteacher. Long before he concerned himself with making a living, Armstrong had decided on painting as his way of life. In deference to his family's wishes he completed academic studies at the University of Toronto. However, he did not neglect his development as a painter and, while still in his teens, and made a thorough analysis of many of Delacroix's great figure paintings.

During the years 1940-1942 he taught Spanish, German and the history of art at Trinity College School and Upper Canada College in Toronto. In 1942, Dr. Arthur Lismer, a central figure in the Group of Seven, sponsored Armstrong for the teaching staff of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. In Montreal he took a studio just below Sherbrooke Street and became an active member of Montreal's artistic community. As well as Dr. Lismer and A.Y. Jackson of the Group of Seven, he enjoyed the company of John Lyman, Gordon Webber, Louis Muhlstock, Marion Scott, Goodridge Roberts, Alfred Pellan, Jack Humphrey and Paul-Emile Borduas, all eminent Canadian painters.

During May of 1943, the celebrated French painter Fernand Léger, came to Montreal and spoke on the origins of modern art. Armstrong attended this talk, his first real introduction to the French Post-Impressionists. He remembered being "'very stimulated'. I went to the studio and painted all night. Sleep was impossible." In 1948 he made his first visit to New York to look at modern paintings and returned via Philadelphia to see a major exhibition on Matisse. It was his first opportunity to view modernist art outside of reproduction and he was overwhelmed. These works made a powerful and lasting impression on the young painter and he became convinced that Europe would offer the strongest stimulus for his painting. Making his first trip to Europe in 1949, he traveled for four months, through France, Italy, and England, studying the masterpieces of the great museums. After his return to Montreal he continued to teach and paint. In 1951, Robert Tyler Davis chose a number of Armstrong's canvases to share on exhibition with the celebrated Goodridge Roberts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. By the spring of 1952 Armstrong was again able to leave for Italy.

Once in Florence, Armstrong rented a studio on the Pitti side of the Arno, which commanded a view of the river, the Uffizi, the Palazzo Vecchio, and Brunelleschi's Dome of the Cathedral. In the opposite direction was the Piazzale Michelangelo. Here Armstrong was in his element and felt at home. Later the same year he was invited to Paris where he stayed through the winter months, once more enjoying the opportunity to examine the great paintings of the Paris museums. He returned to Florence via Genoa, where he spent a few months living and painting in a palatial residence overlooking the Mediterranean. In subsequent years he traveled to both Rome and Venice where he was able to pursue his great interest in classical Greco-Roman art.

In the late 1950's Armstrong returned to Montreal where he continued to paint and exhibit. In 1959 a major solo exhibition of his work was held in New York City. Nine years later, in 1968, he moved to the region of his birth, Thornhill, Ontario, where he lived in a gracious, historic home set in a large tree-filled garden. On one side of this peaceful small park Armstrong had a small, sunlit studio, to which he went most mornings, to paint. William Walton Armstrong passed away in 1998.

Unlike many Canadian painters, William Walton Armstrong has had prolonged, first-hand experience of the classical and post-modern art in Europe. Like the French Post-Impressionists, Matisse, Gauguin, Chagall and Buffet, he built pictures from areas of flat color which are characterized by directness of drawing. He simplified tonality and gave equal intensity to each part of the painting. The foreground and background in a still life and the drapery behind the model were all given equal importance. That treatment of surface continues the tradition of modernist painting that was first done by the French Impressionists: in the 20th century, this evolved into abstract painting.

Flowering Quince - 1984
oil on canvas, 20 in x 24 in