iconTechnique: Oil, watercolor, graphite
Born September 24, 1904 in Barbados, to Canadian parents, Goodridge Roberts is a painter known for his representations of the fields and hills of Quebec.
Coming from a family of poets, he received his training from the École des beaux-arts de Montréal from 1923 to 1925 and from the Art Students League of New York from 1926 to 1928 where he studied with John Sloan, Max Weber and Boardman Robinson who taught him the work of French modernists and Italian primitives such as Giotto.
At the end of his studies, he worked as a designer for a year before settling in Ottawa in 1930. He then taught art at the Ottawa Art Association where he was also able to exhibit his works. He then created a summer art school near Wakefield in the Gatineau Valley.
He exhibited for the first time solo in 1932, at the Club des arts de Montréal. Four years later, after spending three years as the first resident artist at Queen's University in Kingston, he moved to Montreal where he joined Ernest Neumann to open the Roberts-Neumann School of Art. In 1938, he became a founding member of the Eastern Group and of the Contemporary Art Society in 1939.
For almost ten years, he taught at the Art Association of Montreal, except for a two-year hiatus during the Second World War, during which he was an official war painter in England. By the early 1950s, Roberts was already famous in Canada for his participation in numerous Canadian and international exhibitions, and in 1952 he was one of four artists who represented Canada at its first official participation in the Venice Biennale. .
In 1953, Roberts Goodridge obtained a scholarship which allowed him to paint in Europe, where he spent a few months in Paris, Italy and Agay, on the Côte d'Azur. In 1959, he was the first artist in residence at the University of New Brunswick. In 1969, the National Gallery of Canada presented a retrospective of his works, which was unusual for a still living artist.