Eric Freifeld

Eric Freifeld (1919-1984).. , Canadian realist painter and educator, active from c. 1940 to c. 1984. His pictures are in private and public collections in Canada and elsewhere, including the National Gallery , Ottawa; the Montreal Museum of Fine Art ; the Vancouver Art Gallery ; and the Art Gallery of Ontario , Toronto. Freifeld was in group shows and one-man shows in Canada and the UK. He was the recipient of Canada Council awards , and in 1983 he was made an Honorary Fellow of The Ontario College of Art and Design .

Life and career

Freifeld was born in Saratov, U.S.S.R. in 1919, emigrating to Canada with his mother and sister in 1924. While attending elementary and high school he painted in his spare time, eventually quitting school at the age of 16, and receiving a Carnegie Trust scholarship to attend the Banff Summer School of Fine Arts . Shortly after, Freifeld travelled in the UK, attended classes at the St Martin's School of Art , and in February 1939, had an exhibition of 14 works in London's Brook Street Gallery

With the threat of war in Europe, Freifeld returned to Canada, where the Australian conductor Arthur Benjamin helped to arrange for a one-man museum exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1940. , including the 1954 watercolor, "Back Door" , and Raphael Soyer . Soyer wrote about Freifeld's approach in the introduction to the 1977 monograph on the artist: