Doris McCarthy

Dorys Below the Shops, landscape watercolour painting

2003

Doris McCarthy was born in Calgary in 1910 and showed an early interest in art. Her family moved to Toronto in 1913 and she enrolled at the Ontario College of Art in 1925, where she studied under Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and J.W. Beatty. Lismer helped her secure a job teaching art classes at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1930, which she continued for the next five years. Additionally, she continued her own education with a course at the Hamilton Technical School, where Hortense Gordon offered her critical analysis of design and composition. McCarthy became a teacher at the Central Technical School in 1933, where she stayed until 1972. In the summers she would travel and paint; the landscape was most often her subject matter. In 1942 Mellors Gallery (now Roberts Gallery) hosted McCarthy’s first solo exhibition; 1945 saw her become a member of the Ontario Society of Artists, and in 1951 she was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy. She exhibited many times throughout the years with both of these groups, as well as with the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour. Retrospectives of McCarthy’s work were mounted in 1990, 1992, 1996 and two in 1999. In 2004 she was honoured by the University of Toronto, Scarborough, with the opening of the Doris McCarthy Gallery. Source: Heffel Gallery