Frederick Arthur Verner

Career Highlights

After study at Heatherly's Art School, London, in 1856, Frederick Arthur Verner enlisted in the 3rd West York Regiment. On his return to Canada in 1862, he earned his living as a photographer.

In time he became a painter of Indigenous peoples, seeking accuracy in his subjects. He was present with Manitoba's lieutenant-governor Alexander Morris in 1873 at the signing of Treaty 3 (North-West Angle Treaty) at Lake of the Woods. The sketches Verner made there were the basis for many of his later paintings.

He also carefully studied the buffalo (one sketch, now at the National Gallery of Canada, was made in Buffalo Bill's show in London in 1892) and used these sketches for buffalo canvases such as The Last of the Herd. His mellow vision conveyed an image of the Canadian West as a secret garden, an oasis of calm and quiet, rather than the tragic battlefield portrayed by many American painters.

Verner left Canada and moved to London, England, in 1880.