Jack Nichols

Who is Jack Nichols?

Jack Nichols was a Canadian artist from Montreal.

He worked for a time with Frederick Horsman Varley and Louis Muhlstock. For a few summers during the early 1940s, he worked as a deckhand on cargo boats plying the Great Lakes. In 1943, the National Gallery of Canada commissioned him to depict the activities of the Canadian Merchant Navy and he left on a mission to the Caribbean with Michael Forster.

He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy in February 1944 and worked as an official war artist from April 1944 to August 1945. Most of his works depict the landing operations at Normandy and destroyer movements off Brest.

He obtained a Guggenheim fellowship that allowed him to travel and paint in United States in 1947 and 1948. He taught at the Vancouver School of Art in 1948. He won a prize at the Second International Exhibition of Drawing and Engraving in Lugano, Switzerland in 1952. Lithographs by Nichols, along with works by James Wilson Morrice, Jacques de Tonnancour and Anne Kahane represented Canada at the 1958 Venice Biennale. He was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He lived in Toronto.