Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald

Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald

Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald (1890-1956) - Artist Biography

L.L. (Lionel LeMoine) FitzGerald was an accomplished draftsman, painter, printmaker and art educator. His subjects arose from his detailed observations of nature in Winnipeg and Manitoba, where he worked throughout his life.

FitzGerald took evening classes at A.S. Kesztheyli's Art School in 1909, and from 1912 he found employment designing window displays, interior decorating, and painting theatre backdrops. From 1913 he exhibited with the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and held his first solo exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1921. Feeling the need for more training, he travelled to New York to study at the Art Students League with the Canadian-born artist Boardman Robinson and with Kenneth Hayes Miller during the winter of 1921-22.

Returning to Winnipeg, he worked in commercial design and became assistant to G. Keith Gebhardt, Principal of the Winnipeg School of Art in 1924, before his own appointment as Principal (1929-49). Since teaching made considerable demands on his time, his art developed slowly and methodically. Drawing the Manitoba landscape was as important as painting, and he exhibited primarily in Winnipeg and Toronto. In the summer of 1929, he met Bertram Brooker, artist, broadcaster and playwright, visiting his native Winnipeg on a business trip. The two artists then kept in contact with one another by letter. Fitzgerald had a profound influence on Brooker’s direction in art. Brooker turned from total abstraction to realism. Fitzgerald himself had moved to a greater stylization of his work.

This change was to lead him into the ranks of the Group of Seven, the last member, in 1932, replacing J.E.H MacDonald, who had died earlier that year. Fitzgerald’s work took on more design, his trees became less detailed while at the same time his development of scenes from his house or his backyard began to appear; these were more meticulous, although never cluttered in detail. In 1933, he became a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters, which grew out of the Group of Seven, when it disbanded the same year. By the late 1940’s and 1950’s, he had returned to the cycle of the Impressionists, particularly reminiscent of one of its later members, Georges Seurat, although there is no evidence to suggest that he actually studied Seurat’s work. He did abstract and semi-abstract work in the 1950’s and had done a few in the late 1930’s. Some of his pen and ink drawings were done by making tiny flecks or short strokes to form an outline of his subjects. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa has one of the finest collections of his work due to prudent purchases by its curators, singular bequest of the Douglas M. Duncan Collection, made through Duncan’s sister J.P. Barwick.

He was awarded an Honorary L.L.D., at the University of Manitoba (1952). In 1956, at the age of 66, he died of a heart attack. His ashes were scattered over the area of Snowflake, Manitoba, where he spent his youth during his summer holidays on his grandmother’s farm. In April of 1958, four galleries collaborated in a memorial exhibition at the NGC. The exhibition then went on tour. In May of 1963, an exhibition of 128 of his works titled, “A New Fitzgerald”, was shown at the WAG. The show included portraits, animal sketches, landscapes and a number of nudes.

In the Winnipeg suburb of St. James where he lived most of his life, the community named a lane “Fitzgerald’s Walk” in his memory.

Photo Opposite: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald working from a portable sketching box at Silver Heights, August 23, 1934, Winnipeg Art Gallery Library.

Selected Exhibitions:

1921: Catalogue of Paintings by L.L. FitzGerald, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Board of Trade Building. First solo exhibition (forty-one works).
1927: Exposition d’art Canadien, Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris.
1928: Arts and Letters Club of Toronto. FitzGerald’s first solo exhibition in Eastern Canada.
1929–30: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., Aldine House, 224 Bloor St. W., Toronto.
1935: Exhibition of Drawings by Kathleen Munn, LeMoine FitzGerald, Bertram Brooker, Malloney Galleries, Toronto.
1943: FitzGerald Drawings, Vancouver Art Gallery.
1949: FitzGerald Watercolours and Drawings, Vancouver Art Gallery.
1951: L.L. FitzGerald Paintings and Drawings, Winnipeg Art Gallery.
1958: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, 1890–1956: A Memorial Exhibition, Winnipeg Art Gallery. Catalogue texts by Ferdinand Eckhardt, Lawren Harris, and LeMoine FitzGerald. Travelled to Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Windsor Art Association, London Public Library, Art Gallery of Toronto, Regina College, and Vancouver Art Gallery.
1978: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, 1890–1956: The Development of an Artist, Winnipeg Art Gallery. Curated by Patricia E. Bovey and Ann Davis with Cathy Stewart. Travelled to National Gallery of Canada, July 28–September 10, 1978
2019-2020: Into the Light: Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald, McMichael Canadian Collection, Kleinburg, ON

Permanent Collections:
Art Gallery of Hamilton, ON
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto ON
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at Hart House, Toronto ON
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, ON
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa ON
Winnipeg Art Gallery, MB

Artist Specialization: Writing about his work, Donald Buchanan noted, “…Fitzgerald…worked too slowly and painstakingly ever to be affected by such vagaries of fashion…painted little, and that little with precise care. Most of his year was given over to his duties as principal of the Winnipeg School of Art. The relatively few water-colours and oils he did of the prairie or of the thin tracery of trees along the edges of Manitoba streams were, however, always much admired, as were also his more numerous drawings….” Fitzgerald’s landscapes and still life paintings were drawn from his immediate surroundings—the view of the back lane outside his house; a potted plant on the windowsill. His style grew more spare and abstract over his career. His body work includes painting in oil and watercolour, drawing, printmaking and sculpture.