Joseph Sydney Hallam

Joseph Sydney Hallam RCA, OSA (1898-1953)

Joseph Hallam was born in Manchester, England, and came to Canada at the age of 12. He studied at the Hamilton Technical School and Central Technical School in Toronto, in addition to taking evening classes at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD) under renown artist J.W. Beatty. Hallam found work with Sampson-Matthews in the early 1920s, where he worked alongside Franklin Carmichael, with whom he would later go on sketching trips. Hallam began to gain recognition as an artist during this time, and in the 1930s he executed a series of paintings of historical sites and village scenes, some of which were exhibited at the Canadian National Exhibition. Hallam also worked in watercolour, exhibiting with the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour during this time; his work in this medium was noted by William Colgate and Paul Duval. Hallam's work was exhibited in a one-man show with the famous Blair Laing Gallery of Toronto in 1951, for which Colgate in the introduction to the exhibition's catalogue: "Unhampered by formula, bound by no convention, [Hallam] paints as he sees it, with informed skill, shrewd insight, and sympathetic understanding in a technique well adapted to the subject..." Hallam's work is held within the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the late Pope Pius XII.