The Blacksmith’s, Kearney, Ont.

Private Collection, Ontario

Dorothy M. Farr, “J.W. Beatty 1869-1941”, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, 1981, pages 15, 22-24

J.W. Beatty is known for conveying in his paintings the great beauty he found in his native Ontario landscape. In 1890 the trajectory of Beatty’s life transitioned away from his position as a firefighter and he began to focus on his artistic practice. Beatty married Caroline Cornock and began taking art classes, enrolling in Galbraith’s Academy where his teacher was the respected F.M. Bell-Smith. This change in course had a profound effect on his life, and that of his wife. As Dorothy M. Farr remarks, “It would seem that Caroline Beatty, although largely undocumented, became the disciplining force behind her husband’s talents and ambitions and that she, and not Beatty himself, was responsible for the metamorphosis of Billy Beatty the wild Irish fireman, to J.W. Beatty, Canadian artist.” Beatty went on to study at the Académie Julian in Paris where so many other Canadian art legends received instruction. Upon returning to Canada, Beatty began to embrace the nationalistic pride manifesting in the artistic community of Toronto. He surrounded himself with like-minded individuals at the Arts and Letters Club, “a whole crowd of young men beginning to make their mark in the world of paint, pen and pencil.” Beatty painted alongside A.Y. Jackson in the Rockies, Tom Thomson in Algonquin Park, and occupied a studio in the Studio Building in 1914, shortly after it had been built. Landscapes such as “The Blacksmith’s, Kearney, Ont.” embody the prevailing spirit of the Group of Seven with its reverence for glorious subjects in nature.