Frederick Varley

Varley was born in Sheffield, England,[1] in 1881, the son of Lucy (Barstow) and Samuel James Smith Varley the 7th.[2] He studied art in Sheffield and attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp (1900-1902), Belgium, while he worked on the docks. He immigrated to Canada in 1912 on the advice of another Sheffield native (and future Group of Seven member), Arthur Lismer, and found work at the Grip Ltd. design firm in Toronto, Ontario.[3]

The painting For What? completed by Varley while an official war artist

Beginning in January 1918, he served in the First World War with C.W. Simpson, J.W. Beatty and Maurice Cullen.[4] Varley came to the attention of Lord Beaverbrook, who arranged for him to be commissioned as an official war artist.[5] He accompanied Canadian troops in the Hundred Days offensive from Amiens, France to Mons, Belgium. His paintings of combat are based on his experiences at the front. Although he had been enthusiastic to travel to France as a war artist, he became deeply disturbed by what he saw, saying:

We’d be healthier to forget [the war], and that we never can. We are forever tainted with its abortiveness and its cruel drama.[6]

Varley's Some Day the People Will Return, shown at Burlington House in London and at the Canadian War Memorials Exhibition, is a large canvas depicting a war-ravaged cemetery, suggesting that even the dead cannot escape the destruction.[4]

In Varley's painting For What? (1918), a single gravedigger takes a rest from his labours, a cart full of bodies beside him. It is one of the few official Canadian First World War paintings that does not hide the reality of battlefield death in images of ruins, blasted trees, and battle detritus.[7]

The Group of seven artists

In 1920, he was a founding member of the Group of Seven. He was the only original member of the Group of Seven to specialize in portraiture, but he also painted landscapes. Varley's major contribution to art is his work with the Group of Seven and his portraits.

[8] After living in Ontario for a number of years, Varley moved to Vancouver, BC in 1926 where he became Head of the Department of Drawing and Painting at the School of Decorative and Applied Arts in Vancouver at the invitation of Charles Hepburn Scott. He remained in this position from 1926 until 1933.[9]

In British Columbia, he painted images of mountains and mountainsides, drawing upon several influences from Chinese painting to William Turner and Samuel Palmer. He left in 1936 due to his experiences with depression, and two years later joined fellow artist Terry M. Shortt, the Royal Ontario Museum ornithologist, on a trip to the Arctic in 1938. In 1954, along with a handful of artists including Eric Aldwinckle, he visited the Soviet Union on the first cultural exchange of the Cold War.[10]

He died in Toronto in 1969 and was buried alongside other members of the Original Seven at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection grounds in Kleinburg, Ontario.

• Atanassova, Katerina (2007). F.H. Varley: Portraits Into the Light/Mise en Lumière Des Portraits. Dundurn Press Ltd. ISBN 9781550029093.
• Boulet, Roger; Group of Seven and Tom Thomson (1982), The Canadian Earth, M. Bernard Loates, Cerebrus Publishing
• Brandon, Laura. (2008). Art and War. New York: I.B. Tauris. ISBN 9781845112370; OCLC 225345535
• Brandon, Laura. (2021). War Art in Canada: A Critical History. Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4871-0271-5.
• Davis, Ann (1992). The logic of ecstasy: Canadian mystical painting, 1920–1940. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9780802059161; ISBN 9780802068613; OCLC 26256269
• Reid, Dennis R. (1988). A Concise History of Canadian Painting. Toronto: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195406641; ISBN 978-0-19-540663-4; OCLC 18378555
• Tooby, Michael (1991). Our Home and Native Land: Sheffield's Canadian Artists. Sheffield: Mappin Art Gallery. Retrieved 17 June 2022.
• Varley, Christopher (1979). F. H. Varley. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada. Retrieved 8 May 2023.