Franklin Carmichael was a Canadian artist who also worked as a designer and illustrator of advertising prospects, periodicals and books. As to painting, he became well-known due to his landscapes of Ontario areas which he produced in oil, charcoal and watercolours. He was among the founders of the Group of Seven.
Background
Franklin Carmichael was born on May 4, 1890, in Orillia, Ontario, Canada. He was a son of David Graham Carmichael, a maker of horse-drawn carriages, and Susannah Eleanor Smith.
Franklin revealed his artistic abilities at the early age. To develop his talents, his mother enrolled him in the music and art classes.
Education
At the age of twenty-one, Franklin Carmichael became an apprentice in the field of commercial art at the Grip Limited advertising agency in Toronto. It was there that he got acquainted with his future colleagues Tom Thomson, Arthur Lismer, James Edward Hervey MacDonald and Frederick Varley.
Carmichael combined his apprenticeship with the night classes at the Ontario College of Art (currently Ontario College of Art and Design University) and Toronto Technical School. At the first institution, among his teachers were such notable painters as William Cruickshank and George Reid. At the Technical School, Carmichael received some lessons from the muralist and interior decorator, a German artist Gustav Hahn who had brought Art Nouveau to Canada.
From 1913 to 1914, the painter pursued his training at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) in Antwerp, Belgium. At the outbreak of the First World War, Franklin Carmichael came back to his native Canada.
Franklin Carmichael started his professional career at his father’s carriage making shop where he developed his painting skills by decorating the carriages.
In the middle 1910s, along with his friends and colleagues Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald and Frederick Varley, Carmichael went on to the expeditions during which the artists sketched Canadian landscapes.
In 1914, Franklin Carmichael shared the Studio Building, the gathering place for the Ontario artists, with Tom Tompson who had a great influence on the young painter.
Six years later, Carmichael along with his above-mentioned colleagues formed the famous Group of Seven and became its youngest member. Since that time, Carmichael had regularly presented his artworks at the Group exhibitions till its dissolution in 1933.
At the beginning of the 1920s, in 1922, the painter became an employee, perhaps a head designer at the printmaking company Sampson-Matthews directed by J.E. Sampson. While at the firm, Carmichael worked on the promotional brochures, adverts for newspapers and magazines as well as on the illustrations of various periodicals, such as for Maclean's magazine in 1928.
In 1925, along with the painters Alfred Joseph Casson and Frederik Henry Brigden, Carmichael founded other artistic group dubbed the Canadian Society for Painters in Watercolour. From 1932, he had presided the organization for two years.
The same year, Carmichael abandoned his commercial artistic activity and was named a chairman of the Graphic Design and Commercial Art Department the Ontario College of Art. Combining the post with teaching activity, he had held it for thirteen years.
The next year of the assignment, the painter established one more artistic group, this time called the Canadian Group of Painters among the members of which were some of his former colleagues from the Group of Seven.
Since the beginning of the next decade, Franklin Carmichael returned to his illustrations. He was a head of the typography, illustrated a book by Grace Campbell called Thorn-Apple Tree among other writings of Canadian publishers and authors, and had produced a lot of wood engravings and linocuts till the end of his life.
Within the Group of Seven, some members of which shared concepts of the religious movement called theosophy, Franklin Carmichael also adopted one of its principles – visualize the spiritual value.
Quotations:
"It is imperative that the artist reveals through the medium in which he is happiest, what he sees, thinks and feels about his surroundings."
"A landscape clean and crisp in form and colour, rich in inspiration is all that an artist could wish for, begging to be used, and full of inherent possibilities..."
"We have everything out of which to build ideas and traditions, to fail to make use of them would simply be throwing away a priceless heritage of spirit and material."
"These different things – repose, dignity, movement, energy, grace, rhythm – are part of our very life and make-up. They represent the pattern of our material life and they are the material/structure on which we build designs."
Membership
Group of Seven
,
Canada
April, 1920
Canadian Group of Painters
,
Canada
1933
Royal Canadian Academy of Arts
,
Canada
Connections
Franklin Carmichael married Ada Lillian Went in 1915. The couple had one daughter who was named Mary Franklin Mastin (nee Carmichael).