John Russell Harper

J. Russell Harper FRSC (April 13, 1914 – November 17, 1983) was a Canadian art historian and curator who pioneered the field of Canadian art history. As Robert Fulford said in the Toronto Star: "He did more than anyone else to give Canada a sense of its fine-art tradition".

Career Harper was born at Caledonia, Ontario and worked for some time as a primary school teacher before studying at the Ontario College of Art from 1938 to 1940. During World War II he served, alongside his future wife Mary Elizabeth Goodchild, as a radar mechanic for the Royal Canadian Air Force in Canada and England. After the war, he enrolled at the University of Toronto and received a B.A. in 1948, and an M.A. in 1950 in art and archeology.

In the 1950s, he became the chief cataloguer of the Royal Ontario Museum, and in 1951, he moved to Saint John, New Brunswick, to work for the New Brunswick Museum. After archaeological fieldwork for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, he reported in 1959 on the potential for restoration of the fortress at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia. In 1959, an exhibition was held of his paintings at the University of New Brunswick Art Centre.

From 1959 to 1963, he was the curator of Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada, and from 1965 to 1968 the chief curator of the McCord Museum of McGill University. From 1965 until his retirement in 1979 he lectured as a professor of art history at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. His fonds is in Library and Archives Canada.

Selected publications Painting in Canada: a History, University of Toronto Press, 1966. Reprinted 1977. . Paul Kane's Frontier, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX; 1971. . A People's Art: Primitive, Naïve, Provincial, and Folk Painting in Canada, University of Toronto Press, 1974. . Krieghoff, University of Toronto Press, 1979. . Early painters and engravers in Canada, University of Toronto Press, 1970;