Varley, Frederick Horsman, 1881-1969 : Born in Sheffield, England, in 1881, Frederick Horsman Varley was the youngest of four children of a commercial lithographer. He studied art at the Sheffield School of Art and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, 1900-[1903]. After working as a commercial artist in London, he married Maud Pinder in 1908 and returned to Sheffield, where he taught art and continued to work as a commercial artist. When a fellow member of Sheffield's Heeley Art Club, Arthur Lismer, immigrated to Canada, Varley followed in 1912.
Settling in Toronto, Varley worked for Grip Ltd. and then Rous and Mann, where he met the artist Tom Thomson. He first exhibited his work soon after coming to Canada, at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1912. He became a member of the Arts and Letters Club, where artists Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald were already members, and in 1916 the club gave him a solo exhibition.
In 1918, Varley was appointed a war artist, along with Maurice Cullen, J.W. Beatty and Charles Simpson, as part of Lord Beaverbrook's Canadian War Records programme. He left Canada in March 1918 and spent the next three months at Seaford, before being called to London to work on four portrait commissions. He was sent to France in late August and returned to London in mid-October. His war work was exhibited in the Canadian Memorials Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1919. He returned to France to do more sketching in the spring of 1919, then returned to Canada in August of that year. He was demobilized in March 1920.
Varley participated in the first Group of Seven exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1920. His famous canvas, Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay, was exhibited at the second Group of Seven exhibition and was bought by the National Gallery in 1921. During the 1920's, Varley largely worked on portrait commissions, including ones of Vincent and Alice Massey. In 1924, he spent some months working on portraits in Winnipeg and Edmonton. In 1925, he was appointed an instructor in drawing and painting at the Ontario College of Art.
In 1926, Varley was invited to join the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, where his students were to include Philip Surrey and E.J. Hughes, as well as Vera Weatherbie, who was to become his principal model 1930-1936. While in Vancouver, Varley continued to submit work to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the National Gallery's Annual Exhibitions of Canadian Art. He had two solo shows: at the Art Institute of Seattle in 1930 and at the Vancouver Art Gallery 1932. In 1930, he won the first prize in the Willingdon Art Competition, along with artist George Pepper.
In 1933, Varley resigned from the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts and, with fellow artists and teachers Jock Macdonald and Grace Melvin, opened the British Columbia College of Arts. With the financial collapse of the college two years later, Varley moved to Ottawa to seek work. From 1936 to the mid-1940's, he drifted between Ottawa and Montreal, in 1938 going to the arctic on a sketching trip on board the government supply ship the Nascopie.
In 1944, Varley had a successful solo exhibition at Eaton's Fine Arts Gallery and settled in Toronto, teaching summer school at Doon in 1948 and 1949. In 1949, he was the subject of a National Film Board documentary, directed by Allan Wargon and produced by Tom Daly. In 1954, the Art Gallery of Ontario held a major retrospective of his work, a version of which travelled to Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver. In 1961, Varley received an honorary doctorate from the University of Manitoba. He died in 1969.
