Into the Light ― The Paintings of William Blair Bruce (1859-1906)

Into the Light is a major retrospective of the work of William Blair Bruce (1859?1906), Canada's first Impressionist artist. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Bruce spent his early career in France, where he became one of the group of international artists who studied alongside Claude Monet at Giverny, later moving to Sweden, where he built his home and studio.

With remarkable paintings, some on loan from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seven scholarly essays, and a wealth of archival material including photographs and letters, this is a significant survey of this influential artist and his life.

Tobi Bruce is Senior Curator of Canadian Historical Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. With over twenty years experience working with public collections, Tobi has curated over fifty exhibitions, researched regional and Canadian women artists and written for exhibition catalogues. She has lectured extensively on collection building and curatorship, general art history, and women artists, and has participated as a panelist at conferences nationally and internationally. Her most recent undertakings are The French Connection: Canadian Painters at the Paris Salons (2011) and William Kurelek: The Messenger (2011-2012), a collaboration with the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria which was named in the top three exhibitions of 2012 by editors at Canadian Art magazine. A graduate of Queen’s (BAH Art History) and Carleton (MA in Canadian Art) universities, Tobi also served two terms as a Director with the Ontario Association of Art Galleries.

Michelle Facos teaches art history at Indiana University, Bloomington and was the first North American to write a doctoral dissertation on Swedish painting; her book, Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s (California, 1998) brought Swedish national romantic painting to English-reading audiences for the first time. She has reinserted Scandinavian art into its broader European context in her more recent books: Symbolist Art in Context (California, 2009) and An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art (Routledge, 2011). An internationally-recognized expert on Scandinavian art, Professor Facos has lectured and consulted widely and taught the subject at universities in Germany and Sweden. In May 2014 she will offer a course on Scandinavian art at Poland’s Warsaw University and in 2015 at The American Academy in Rome.

Ross Fox, a native of northwestern Quebec, is a decorative arts and material culture specialist who retired from the Royal Ontario Museum where for ten years he was the curator responsible for Early Canadian Decorative Arts. He is presently a Research Associate at the ROM. His was a multi-faceted career as a museum curator and teacher, both in Canada and the United States, starting out in the Department of Ancient Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and subsequently in Early Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada, Historical Canadian and European Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, European Art at the Mead Art Museum Amherst College, and Director of the Arno Maris Gallery, Westfield State University. He also taught Art History at Springfield College and Westfield State University, and remains an Affiliated Faculty Member in the Department of Fine Art, University of Toronto, where he teaches a course in furniture history. Fox has a Ph.D. in Art History & Archaeology from the University of Missouri.

Arlene Gehmacher, PhD, is Curator of Canadian Paintings, Prints & Drawings at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ontario, where she develops collections-based research and exhibits. Her course ?Collecting Canada” deals with the acquisition, interpretation and display of the ROM’s picture collection and is taught through the Art History Department of the University of Toronto. Her publications cover the 19th-21st centuries, and include articles on Ozias Leduc (1996), Cornelius Krieghoff (2003), Naoko Matsubara (2003), Paul Kane (2010, and upcoming for the Art Canada Institute in 2014), and Arthur Heming (2013). She is the author of Painting for Posterity: The Paintings of William Blair Bruce (Art Gallery of Hamilton, 1999).

William H. Gerdts is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the Graduate School of the City University of New York with specialization in 18th and 19th Century American painting and sculpture. He was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Newark Museum from 1954-1966. In 1971 he assumed his position with the City University of New York, where for six