STREET CORNER

Artist: Franklin Arbuckle, 1909 - 2001

Signed: Hand signed by the artist

Other writing: Name of image and limited edition number in pencil in lower margin.

Edition: 340/495 limited edition,

Sheet Size: 20 x 28 inches

Condition: Excellent unframed; never rolled and will be shipped flat.

Gallery letter of authenticity is included with the art.

I have additional beautiful Franklin Arbuckle prints after his watercolors and paintings available.

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Dolly D. Headley
Fine Art Galleria
Genuine AllExperts Art Expert
Check out my bio/ratings

We consider a good piece one that is done with freedom, insight; supported by collective knowledge. We call that art. I wonder why we do not call it life.

I felt the commentary from “Leif” on Today’s Inspiration blogspot, was personal and gives the reader a familiarity with this extraordinary artist that is unattainable by most biographies.

Franklin Arbuckle
1909 - 2001

Lest you think every Canadian artist of the 50's was simply biding his time in commercial art until he could make it big as an abstract expressionist, let me assure you -- there were plenty of "realistic" illustrators in the field. Chief among them would certainly be Franklin "Archie" Arbuckle

During the 40's and 50's, Arbuckle, who had a close friendship with one of the editors at Maclean's magazine, was responsible for a huge amount of the publication's cover and interior art.

During that time, Arbuckle traveled across Canada by train, painting scenes that caught his interest and sending them back to Maclean's editorial offices in Toronto. Through Arbuckle's work, featured so regularly on the cover of the nation's highest circulated weekly magazine, Canadians across this vast land saw the familiar and the unfamiliar, the extraordinary and the everyday, that which we all shared and that which was unique -- in landscape, people and activity.

Arbuckle taught for many years at the Ontario College of Art. When he retired in 1989 he continued to take many independent sketching trips to the east coast and various small Ontariocommunities. Tom joined him for many of those trips. Clearly, Archie never lost his love of painting on location and enjoyed interpreting the many beautiful spots around the country through his work.

A mutual friend, Tom McNeely, who, as a young in-house artist at a Toronto art studio got to see Arbuckle's originals when they arrived for print production and who later befriended the older man when they met through the Toronto Arts & Letters Club, told me that Archie called himself, "a painter who did some illustration."

On March 30th, 2001 I was fortunate to be invited by Tom to join him, Archie, and a few others for lunch at the Toronto Arts & Letters Club. There, at last, I got to shake the hand of one of the great old men of Canadian illustration. It was a little overwhelming to be in the presence of someone who embodied almost a century of experience in the field I had chosen for my career. Archie was a genial, cordial gentleman, and I wish I had had the opportunity to ask him in greater detail about his career but the happy, noisy gathering never allowed for it. Even then, at age 91, Archie was planning their next painting expedition. Sadly, he passed away only a couple of months later.