Before he was a Group of Seven painter, Arthur Lismer was a wartime artist in Halifax
CBC
When artist Arthur Lismer would sketch along the Halifax waterfront during the latter years of the First World War, his efforts were often met with suspicion.
"The police would ask him, 'Hey, what are you doing here? What's going on? You can't be here,'" said Stacey Barker, a historian of arts and military history with the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
These encounters helped pave the way for Lismer, who later found fame as a Group of Seven artist, to become a commissioned war artist through the Canadian War Memorials Fund.
This program was started in 1916 by Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook) to ensure Canada's war effort was documented through art, said Barker.
The end result was almost 1,000 works of art produced by around 120 artists, most British or Canadian, said Barker.
From 1916 to 1919, Lismer worked in Halifax as the principal of the Victoria School of Art and Design, known today as NSCAD University.
Lismer's home on Cliff Street in Bedford overlooked Bedford Basin, giving him a view of the bustling wartime port where convoys gathered and headed overseas.
More than 66,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders died in the war that lasted from 1914 to 1918.
Barker said Lismer wrote to Eric Brown, an official with the Canadian War Memorials Fund, and asked if he could get access to sketch in restricted areas of the city.
"I think there may have been a little bit of a misunderstanding," said Barker. "I think Brown thought Lismer was asking for a commission, so that's what he gave him."
Lismer's commission became official in June 1918, months before the war ended on Nov. 11, 1918.
He produced three paintings and 16 lithographs, says the National Gallery of Canada's website.
As part of his work, Lismer boarded some ships, said Barker.
She said he was fond of capturing "dazzle ships," which was a way of painting ships by using "oceany colours" to camouflage them from the enemy.
The Rachel Notley government's consumer carbon tax wound up becoming a weapon the UCP wielded to drum the Alberta NDP out of office. But that levy-and-repayment program, and the wide-ranging "climate leadership plan" around it, also stood as the NDP's boldest, provincial-reputation-altering move in their single-term tenure.