Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith

Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith
Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith, painting Lake Louise, c. 1908
Born	(1846-09-26)September 26, 1846 London, England
Died	June 23, 1923(1923-06-23) (aged 76) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Known for	landscape painter

Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith (September 26, 1846 – June 23, 1923) was a Canadian landscape painter best known for his works of the Rocky Mountains and the Selkirk Range.

Bell-Smith emigrated to Canada from England in 1866. He had studied painting in England and worked as an artist and photographer in Montreal until 1871, when he moved to Toronto. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s he sketched, painted, and taught art classes in Toronto, Hamilton, and London, Ontario.

In 1886 Bell-Smith seized the opportunity to paint the Canadian Rockies when the Vice-President of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), William Cornelius Van Horne, offered free travel passes to several artists who would sketch and paint vistas of the Canadian west. The CPR wanted artistic works that would heighten public interest in transcontinental travel. Bell-Smith’s stylistically conservative paintings were popular in both eastern Canada and Britain, and he frequently returned to the west to work. He was particularly fond of the natural splendour of the area around Lake Louise and by the turn of the century he made annual trips to the west.

These experiences led Bell-Smith to advocate for a Canadian school of art which drew its uniqueness from the use of the Canadian landscape as its subject matter. Later artists, including Tom Thomson, Emily Carr, and the Group of Seven, contributed to this focus on Canada’s natural environment in art.

Bell-Smith also created many paintings of late Victorian and Edwardian eastern Canada and Britain. One of his most famous and playful paintings is Lights of a City Street, which portrays the intersection of Yonge and King Streets in Toronto in 1894. Bell-Smith depicted himself in the painting as the man buying a newspaper, his son is the man raising his hat, and the policeman is Bill Redford, the constable actually stationed at the corner.