Carl Fellman Schaefer

Carl Schaefer was born in Hanover, Ontario, and attended the Ontario College of Art. The Group of Seven artists J.E.H. MacDonald and Arthur Lismer were among his teachers. He found the countryside around his birthplace particularly inspiring, especially during the lean years of the 1930s. His fortunes as an artist turned when in 1940 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to paint full-time in New England. Three years later he was commissioned into the RCAF. After the war he taught for many years at the Ontario College of Art before retiring. Schaeffer's work is often seen as iconic of the interwar period, greatly expressive, even in his pure landscape of the Depression years and man's tenuous connection to the land.