CHARLES GOLDHAMER
1903-1985
Charles Goldhamer, was commissioned as one of Canada's official war artists, and his candidly observed charcoal drawings of burned Canadian airmen in an English hospital are some of the most horrific images of WWII. He is represented extensively in the Canadian War Collection.
After the war, he was married to British comedienne Anna Russell. For 42 years he was in the art department of Toronto's Central Technical School (he retired as chairman in 1969).
Working in oil, watercolour, charcoal, pastel and pencil, he was a portrait, figure and landscape painter as well as a printmaker specializing in lithographs and wood block prints. His style of teaching he learned from Arthur Lismer, his own teacher at the Ontario College of Art. Like other painters in the 1930s, especially his friend Fritz Brandtner, Goldhamer found a base in Baie-St-Paul, painting habitants in Charlevoix County. His work in Québec, often in watercolour, was the start of his reputation. Fresh and sparkling, it recorded the area's rolling terrain. Sometimes his watercolours – like those of Carl Schaefer and Charles Comfort – recall the work of American artists Charles Burchfield and Charles Sheeler. He often painted with A. Y. Jackson.
He exhibited with the RCA between 1926-1941 and the MMFA in 1955. His work is represented in the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Canada.
(excerpt: Joan Murray, The Canadian Encyclopedia)
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