Introduction
Jack Weldon Humphrey (12 January 1901–23 March 1967) was a Canadian landscape and figure painter, mainly in watercolour.
Biography
Humphrey was born in Saint John, New Brunswick. He studied at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, under Phillip Hale and painting at the National Academy of Design, the Arts Students League, New York, and Charles Hawthorn's Cape Cod School. He was a Tiffany Foundation student at Oyster Bay, Long Island, 1927. He studied in Europe from 1929 to 1930, studying in Paris with Andre Lhote, and at the Grande Chaumiere academy and in Munich at the Hans Hofmann school. He also travelled in Italy, Holland, Belgium, and England. He visited Vancouver in 1933 and Mexico in 1938.
Humphrey was a founding member of the C.G.P. in 1933. In 1951 he taught at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. From 1952 to 1954 he painted in Paris on a government fellowship. Returning from France in 1954, he developed abstract and nonobjective tendencies in gouache and oil landscapes, while his beautiful watercolours focused on the intimate details of nature.
Humphrey's paintings of the harbour, streets and workers of Saint John in Canada established his reputation as a regional artist and his work extended to numerous portraits of friends and the city's children. Making no concessions to fashion, Humphrey's tough, honest approach made him a respected member of Montreal's Contemporary Art Society and the Canadian Group of Painters.
He died on 23 March 1967 in hospital at Saint John, New Brunswick. He had been recovering from a recent surgery.