Eric Freifeld

1919-1984

Eric Freifeld was born in Saratov, Russia and came to Canada in 1924 following the death of his father when he was 5 years old. Freifeld grew up in Alberta and quit school at 16 years old to pursue a career as a full-time artist. In 1937, he won the Carnegie Trust Fund Scholarship to attend the Banff School of Fine Arts. Freifeld later continued his studies at the St. Martin’s School of Art in London, England. During this time, he had a solo show at Brook Street Galleries, which was sold out and critically acclaimed. Soon after, Freifeld came to international recognition. As war threatened in Europe, Freifeld moved to Vancouver, where he had a solo show at the Vancouver Art Gallery. With the outbreak of the second World War, Freifeld taught at the Canadian Camouflage School with Jack Shadbolt. He also taught at the Vancouver School of Fine Art. In 1944, Freifeld moved to New York to study at the Art Students’ League. Two years later he returned to Canada, this time settling in Toronto to teach watercolour and figure drawing at the Ontario School of Art (now OCAD), where he taught for thirty years. Writing in the 1986 retrospective catalogue published by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Jack Shadbolt called Freifeld “a visionary with stubborn ideals” with “a lively mind…obsessive humanism and endlessly amused and bewitched curiosity about the human soul and its strange manifestations.”