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His many academic achievementsincluded a Doctor of Law, two graduate degrees and a PhD from Harvard. He is the one and only prime minister to have attained a doctorate of philosophy. Inside the doorway were a number of hostesses greeting paranormal enthusiasts as they entered. I was ushere into Watson’s studio room where a story was told to me about Phoebe Amelia Watson who regularly visits the gallery, despite her death over 60 years ago. The house at 1754 Old Mill Road was built by the Ferrie family, affluent industrialists from Scotland. Adam Ferrie was instrumental in developing the area known as Doon, building a stone mill, a distillery, a store, a cooperage and several homes.
Many people were quietly ushered into the dimly lit vestibule of the fabled artist’s home.
Homer Watson House
It was originally thought that Adam built this house in 1834, however no archival information has been located to support this date. It is possible that the house was built by his brother Robert Ferrie around 1850, after Adam’s death. Robert Ferrie also donated the land for the Presbyterian church next door and set up a Post Office. From humble beginnings, Homer Watson House & Gallery has been the host to many remarkable artists. Delivery time is estimated using our proprietary method which is based on the buyer's proximity to the item location, the shipping service selected, the seller's shipping history, and other factors. Watson spends part of her time in the 12-story building at the corner of Lexington Ave.
Clerestory windows allowed natural light to enter the gallery while providing ample wall space to hang his paintings. Today the Homer Watson House & Gallery aims to preserve and celebrate the legacy of Homer Watson’s creative spirit through appreciation, enjoyment and practice of the visual arts. Through exhibitions, events, programs and a museum space of the late artist’s studio, the Homer Watson House & Gallery has something for everyone. In Toronto held a hearteningly successful show and sale of Watson’s work, paintings from the previous approximately thirteen years that, until then, Watson had reserved in his private Doon gallery.
Life and career
Watson, a committed environmentalist, was the key organizer and president of the Waterloo County Grand River Park Limited, which saved Cressman’s Woods near the artist’s home. His environmental interests paralleled his certainty that artists who lacked a sense of living connection to the landscapes around them risked falling back on impersonal formulas. He explored this belief in a series of half-autobiographical and half-fictional drafts for manuscripts that elucidated his philosophy of landscape painting but that went unpublished until well after his death. (1825–1894), one of the most ambitious, influential, and successful American landscape artists of the second half of the nineteenth century, although in later life Watson stated that they had not in fact met. Homer Ransford Watson was born on 14 January 1855, in Doon, Ontario, the second of Ransford and Susan Mohr Watson's five children.
Homer Watson, On the River at Doon, 1885, oil on canvas, 61 x 91.6 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In early 1882, the twenty-seven-year-old Wilde undertook what developed into a year-long lecture tour of the United States and Canada. He addressed audiences on the subjects of Aestheticism and the importance of beauty in daily life. Wilde had yet to establish a reputation as an author, and his mannerisms and exotic clothing provoked ridicule, but the tour was a commercial success.
14" Gallery Art Canvas: Bold And Brash Framed Painting Squidward Spongebob
As a gift for Queen Victoria, Watson was able to purchase the home and its land in 1883. By 1893 he had added a studio, featuring a frieze displaying the names and small paintings inspired by European artists he admired. The year 1906 saw more changes to the house, when a gallery was added to display Watson’s art.
He copied works at the Toronto Normal School and was mainly self-taught, but met other artists in Toronto (e.g., Lucius O'Brien) while working part-time at the Notman-Fraser photography studio. He has been characterized as the painter who first painted Canada as Canada, rather than as a pastiche of European painting. He was a member and president (1918–1922) of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, as well as a founding member and first president (1907–1911) of the Canadian Art Club.
Homer Watson, A Hillside Gorge, 1889, oil on canvas, 45.5 x 61 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. The painting was not only accepted for exhibition but given a good position in the dense floor-to-ceiling hanging. Homer Watson, Landscape, Scotland, 1888, oil on canvas, 86.5 x 122.3 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.George Clausen, Winter Work, 1883–84, oil on canvas, 77.5 x 92.1 cm, Tate, London.
During that time he had moved from landscapes characterized by dark, chromatically restricted hues to views in which lighter but often puzzling reddish tonalities were increasingly present. Some one hundred paintings were shown at The Jenkins Art Gallery, and half of them found purchasers. In 1855 Homer Watson, one of Canada's first internationally recognized artists, was born in the village of Upper Doon, in a small house still standing at the corner of Tilt Drive and Doon Village Road. Though there was no art instruction in the village the young Watson developed his skills in drawing and painting at an early age, encouraged by an aunt who gave him a set of paints.
This development was the beginning of village life at the conjunction of Schneider's Creek and the Grand River. Health problems were compounded by financial disaster when the collapse of the stock market in October 1929 devastated the stocks and bonds in which Watson had invested his considerable earnings. He eventually saw no option but to transfer title of his current and future paintings to the Waterloo Trust and Savings Company as collateral for a monthly allowance.
In the past the task of organizing international exhibitions of Canadian art had fallen to the RCA, and the academy was furious about the change. In 1923 its executive and many of its other members decided to boycott the 1924 exhibition. The decision was announced in a letter published in newspapers, above the signatures of thirty-one members, including recently retired president Homer Watson. Techniques, just as the structure and goals of the Canadian Academy largely paralleled those of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts. The Homer Watson House & Gallery represents both the industrial and the artistic heritage of the village of Lower Doon. The original house, built in the 1830's in the Scottish Gothic style of architecture, was part of an industrial complex constructed by Adam Ferrie Jr.
Revealing what looked like a modernized child’s arts and craft daycare centre. “Phoebe” visits so often that employees have settled on using her first name. They believe she just wants to be a part of the daily upkeep of the gallery. A psychic soiree of sorts was set to begin at the purportedly haunted Homer Watson House.
A small village founded in the 1830s at the junction of Schneider's Creek and the Grand River, Doon's earliest documented population was 150 in the 1871 census. Watson descended from German Mennonite settlers who arrived in Ontario in the early 19th century. His father, a mill and factory owner, died in 1861 when Watson was six years old. Following Ransford's death, the family's only source of income was Susan's work as a seamstress. Ransford left behind a library of books that Watson studied from and influenced his early drawings. He sought the advice of Thomas Mower Martin in Toronto, and moved there in 1874.
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