Carmichael, Franklin

Date of Birth 1890-05-04, Orillia, Ontario

Date of Death 1945-10-24, Toronto, Ontario

Cemetery: Saint Andrews and Saint James Cemetery, Orillia, Ontario. Block J

Cause of death: pancreatic cancer

Franklin Carmichael was a member of the Group of Seven.  He was primarily a watercolourist but also worked as an illustrator and teacher.

Franklin Carmichael was born in Orillia, Ontario in 1890. He studied first at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, and later at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, 1914-1915. He was an original member of the Group of Seven, 1920, the Canadian Group of Painters, 1933, and of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, A.R.C.A., 1935; R.C.A., 1938. He was an instructor at the Ontario College of Art, 1932-45, while he painted the landscape mainly in northern Ontario. He died in Toronto.

Carmichael sponsored a purely Canadian art expression as opposed to the European tradition. While employed as an office boy at a graphic arts firm in Toronto, Carmichael met then commercial designers J.E.H. MacDonald, Tom Thomson, and Arthur Lismer. His pictures hang in the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Hart House, and St. Hilda’s College, Toronto, the Art Gallery of Vancouver, the National Gallery, Cape Town, as well as in many private collections.