Cuthbertson, George Adrian, 1898-1969 : George Adrian Cuthbertson was a marine artist and researcher. Born in Toronto in 1898, from an early age he was preoccupied with ships. His education and art training was acquired at several institutions including the Toronto Model School, the University of Toronto schools, and later the Westmount Academy in Montreal. He also studied with John David Kelly in Toronto, and with William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal. When he was 13, his family moved to Montreal where he worked in the summer on a steamer as an able bodied seaman.
He entered the Royal Military College at Kingston in1914, but at 17 yearned for a naval posting and transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy, serving from 1915 to 1918 as the Navy's youngest commissioned officer at the time. He served on mostly trawlers, mine sweepers, and mine layers, all the while surreptitiously drawing on-the-spot sketches, on minute pads carried in the palm of his hand. He had decided to write a history of the Great Lakes shipping, and conducted extensive research in museums, archives (including the Dominion Archives in Ottawa) and libraries, and admiralty offices. After the war he took a shore berth, and while operating a woollen mill at Thurso, Quebec, continued to amass research notes and illustrations for his shipping study, working before and after mill hours, for the next 12 years.
He was invited to exhibit his work at the archives in Ottawa, where the outcome of a chance visit by a Canada Steamship Lines executive, was the purchase of the collection that would form the basis of their marine museum collection. They held exhibitions of his work with accompanying catalogues, in 1928, and again in 1942, the last travelling to London and Fort William, Ontario and to the Mariners Museum in Newport, Virginia. He also exhibited at T. Eaton Co. in Montreal in 1932. During this time he became prominent as a marine painter, exhibiting in major centres in Canada and the United States. Along with Paul Caron, the artist illustrated Blodwen Davies' book "Saguenay," (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, Ltd., 1930). Cuthbertson was both author and illustrator of the finished version of his life's work: "Freshwater, a history of the Great Lakes," (Toronto: MacMillan, 1931). His works are to be found in a wide number of marine museums throughout North America. He died in Thurso, Quebec in 1969.
