Canadian Artist John Colin Forbes
John Colin Forbes helped establish a distinct Canadian artistic tradition while maintaining close connections with the cultural institutions of Britain and Europe. He became a prominent portraitist whose subjects included prime ministers, parliamentary leaders, and members of the British royal family. His career reflected the growing importance of portraiture in Canada's public life, as political institutions sought lasting visual records of the people who shaped the country.
Forbes was born in Toronto in 1846, the son of Duncan Forbes, a Scottish immigrant, and Jane Turner. He attended Upper Canada College, one of Toronto's established educational institutions. The accounts of Forbes's artistic training differ. Library and Archives Canada records that he studied painting in Paris and London during the 1860s before returning to Canada. Other biographical accounts describe a less conventional education, suggesting that he was initially self-taught and subsequently studied in Europe, including at the Royal Academy and the South Kensington Art School. One account identifies the artist T. Mower Martin as a teacher, although this claim is not consistently reported.
What is clear is that Forbes acquired the skills and professional standing necessary to establish himself in a competitive field. An early landscape, Toronto Bay, reportedly earned a diploma at the 1866 Provincial Exhibition.
Forbes's career developed alongside the growth of organized artistic life in Canada. In 1872, he became a founding member of the Ontario Society of Artists. Eight years later, he was among the founding members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, established in 1880 to promote artistic standards and strengthen the position of professional artists in the country.
These institutions provided artists with opportunities for professional association, exhibition, and recognition. Forbes's participation placed him among those helping to establish a more permanent framework for Canadian art at a time when artists frequently depended on private patrons and commissions.
Portraiture became his principal occupation. His first important Ottawa commission was a portrait of Frederick Temple Blackwood, Earl of Dufferin, Governor General of Canada from 1872 to 1878. The commission brought further work, including a portrait of Dufferin's daughter, Lady Helen Blackwood. Such patronage helped establish Forbes's reputation among the political and social circles of the capital. His work, The Foundering of the Hibernia, was exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, demonstrating that his interests extended beyond portraiture from the beginning of his career.
Between 1878 and 1893, Forbes painted leading Canadian political figures, including Sir John A. Macdonald, Alexander Mackenzie, Sir Charles Tupper, and Wilfrid Laurier. These were not all official commissions, but they demonstrate the confidence placed in him by prominent individuals and their associates.
His most sustained contribution to Canada's institutional portraiture came through commissions for the federal Parliament. He painted four official portraits of Speakers of the House of Commons and six of Speakers of the Senate. These works served a purpose beyond personal commemoration: they helped preserve the visual history of Canada's parliamentary institutions.
Although Forbes became best known for portraits, landscape remained an important part of his artistic practice. In 1885 and 1886, he travelled west with other artists at the invitation of William Van Horne, the general manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The artists were encouraged to paint the Rocky Mountains and other western scenery, helping introduce the region to prospective tourists.
The project connected art with Canada's national development. The railway was opening access to landscapes that had previously been difficult for many travelers to reach, and images of the mountains could help present western Canada as a destination of remarkable natural beauty. Forbes's mountain subjects, including Mount Stephen, belong to this broader effort to record and publicize the western landscape.
Forbes also developed a reputation beyond Canada. An engraving based on his portrait of British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone was published in London by Henry Graves & Co. on July 16, 1892. The photogravure, made by Franz Hanfstaengl, is now held by the National Portrait Gallery in London. Forbes's association with British political portraiture continued with a commission from the National Liberal Club for a companion portrait of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
Forbes had a long association with Wilfrid Laurier, Canadian Prime Minister from 1896 to 1911. He first painted Laurier in 1885, using a photograph taken around 1882 by the Topley Studio in Ottawa. Laurier subsequently described Forbes as a friend, and the portrait became associated with the Liberal leader's public image.
On May 15, 1902, Laurier received another portrait as a gift from friends and Liberal supporters. In his remarks, he expressed regret that Forbes was then working in the United States. In 1906, Laurier presented the painting to the National Gallery of Canada. The gallery also records a portrait of Laurier by Forbes dated 1893.
Forbes's most extraordinary commission came in 1904, when he sought the opportunity to paint King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. The surviving correspondence in the Laurier fonds at Library and Archives Canada documents his efforts. In a letter dated April 14, 1904, Forbes asked Laurier for assistance in obtaining the commission. A petition bearing the names of 92 members of Parliament followed, and Laurier wrote to Governor General Lord Minto recommending the artist.
The resulting royal portraits marked an important distinction in Forbes's career: he became the first Canadian painter to have a sitting with a British monarch. The commission represented recognition at the highest level of the imperial political and cultural establishment, an achievement for a Canadian artist whose professional reputation had been built through years of work in portraiture.
Tragically, the portraits of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra were destroyed in the fire that devastated Canada's Parliament buildings in February 1916, less than twelve years after they had been painted. Forbes's parliamentary portraits, however, survived, preserving a substantial part of his contribution to Canada's institutional memory.
Forbes married Laura Gertrude Holbrook in Ottawa, and they had three sons. One son, Kenneth Forbes, followed his father into portrait painting, creating a second generation of artists within the family. The connection between father and son is documented in the collections of Library and Archives Canada, which preserves material relating to both men.
Forbes spent part of his later career working in the United States, although the dates and circumstances of his move south and eventual return to Canada remain unclear. He died in Toronto in 1925, aged seventy-nine.
Several of his works remain in Canadian public collections. The National Gallery of Canada holds his portraits of Sir John A. Macdonald, Laurier, and John Murray Clark. The House of Commons preserves his portrait of Sir Charles Tupper and portraits of parliamentary Speakers. Library and Archives Canada also holds a large oil portrait of an unidentified man, believed to have been a former mayor of Ottawa, though that identification remains uncertain.
John Colin Forbes's legacy rests on more than the number or prominence of his sitters. Through his portraits, he helped preserve the faces of Canada's political leadership during a formative period in the country's history. Through his participation in the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, he contributed to the development of institutions that supported Canadian artists. His landscapes, meanwhile, recorded a changing country whose expanding transportation networks brought new regions into public view.
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