Biography
After studying in Helsinki, he emigrated to Canada in 1926, where he continued his formal art studies in Montreal at the Museum of Fine Art under Edmond Dyonnet. He moved to Nova Scotia in 1945 and began to study oil painting under Dtanley Royle at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. deGarthe later studied marine painting in Rockport, Massachusetts under Stanley Woodward, followed by Emile Gruppe in East Gloucester, Massachusetts and George Groz at the Art Students League in New York. He also spent many winters studying in Europe at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere in Paris, France as well as Académie Julian in Paris and the Academie Del Belle Arti in Rome, Italy.
deGarthe was art director of an advertising firm in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada for 15 years and ran his own company, deGarthe Advertising Art, in Halifax for 10 years. He exhibited 138 works at the Halifax Memorial Library in 1958, which was sponsored by the Nova Scotia Museum of Fine Arts. In 1959 over 100 of his paintings were exhibited at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. His painting "Approaching Storm" was voted most popular at the 1959 Maritime Art Exhibition at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.
In 1948 deGarthe and his wife Agnes bought a summer home in Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia and in 1955 deGarthe gave up his career in the city and moved to Peggy's Cove permanently. Living in Peggy's Cove his artistic work was devoted to marine subjects. He sculpted an outcropping 30 m (100 ft) granite face of rock which he named Fisherman's Monument which he dedicated to Nova Scotian fisherman. He donated the sculpture of thirty-two fishermen and their wives and children enveloped by the wings of a guardian angel to the province of Nova Scotia and it can be viewed in a park located behind his former home.
In 1963 deGarthe completed two murals for St. John's Anglican Church at Peggy's Cove. His works are also in the collection of the Nova Scotia Museum of Fine Arts, the Barbados Museum of Fine Arts as well as numerous private collections around the world.
Read more about this topic: William E. DeGarthe
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