Goodridge Roberts

Who was Goodridge Roberts?

William Goodridge Roberts was a Canadian painter known for his landscape paintings and unassuming still lifes and interiors.

Goodridge Roberts was the son of poet and novelist Theodore Goodridge Roberts and Frances Seymour Allen. Roberts was born in Barbados in 1904 while his parents were on holiday from their New Brunswick home.

Roberts studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal and at the Art Students League of New York. From 1933 to 1936 was the resident artist at Queen's University. In 1938 Roberts joined the Eastern Group of Painters, and in 1939 he exhibited at the New York World's Fair. He taught at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 1940 to 1952. During the period from 1943 to 1945 he was an official war artist for the Royal Canadian Air Force.

In 1952, works by Roberts along with those of Emily Carr, David Milne and Alfred Pellan represented Canada at the Venice Biennale.

A scholarship was awarded by the Canadian government to allow Roberts to study painting in France. Then in 1959 he won the Glaxebrook award at the National Gallery of Canada for a landscape painting. This year until 1960 Roberts was the resident artist at the University of New Brunswick. In 1964, he won the A. J. Casson Award, the annual “Open Water” competition organized by the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour.