Grant Kenneth MacDonald

Grant Kenneth MacDonald (1909-1987)

Grant MacDonald was born in Montreal and grew up in Galt, Ontario, where his father was a minister. MacDonald showed early interest in art, using his school textbooks for sketching. He caught the attention of renown painter Carl Ahrens, who began to train MacDonald. In his teens, MacDonald moved to Toronto, where he worked as a commercial artist for a city newspaper whilst attending evening classes at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD). In the 1930s, MacDonald worked abroad, producing celebrity and theatrical sketches in London and New York City. His reputation did not wane in Toronto, where his work was published in the Toronto Star, Saturday Night, and the Montreal Gazette; the Roberts Gallery in Toronto held a one-man show of his work in 1941. Known internationally for his portrait work, MacDonald turned to war art during WWII and also produced a number of sketches of Canadian National Railway employees. His shows were often sold out, and soon MacDonald was honoured with a one-man show at the famous Laing Gallery in Toronto in 1950. MacDonald also designed model theatres as a hobby and noted novelist Robertson Davies asked MacDonald to design the set for his first full-length play “Fortune my Foe.” MacDonald continued to exhibit frequently, doing one-man shows across Canada including the New Design Gallery in Vancouver, regular shows at the Roberts Gallery in Toronto, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario, for which photographer Yousuf Karsh introduced and praised MacDonald’s work. His work is held within the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Queen’s University in Kingston, Hart House of the University of Toronto, and elsewhere.