Stanley C. Knapp AOCA (1912-1995)
Stanley Clifford Knapp was born in Devonshire, England in 1912. He immigrated to Canada in 1930 at just 18 years old and found work at the Hudson’s Bay Company, taking charge of the Company’s post in Clyde, 500 miles north of Frobisher Bay, Southern Baffin Land in the Northwest Territories. During his term at Clyde, Knapp took up painting and produced an oil he had done of his post, which he set by ship to H.S. Southam, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Canada. What was remarkable about the painting was that Knapp had managed to execute it without having any art supplies available at his post; the brush he made from his own hair, and a piece of cardboard his canvas using some common house paint. Knapp later sent a letter requesting proper art supplies, and the following year the Gallery sent up a set of artist’s paints and brushes by way of the S.S. Nascopie, the Hudson’s Bay Company ship.
“He can wield a skinning knife as well as a palette-knife,” wrote Robert Reade of Knapp in an article featured in the Toronto Star (1937). “He can tell at a glance whether a white fox was trapped in Baffin Land or Ungava or the Mackenzie River delta. He has experience of the trail as well as the trading post. He can drive a dog team with a 20 foot whip and has been up and down Baffin Land from Lake Harbor to Clyde Inlet to Pangnirtung and Pond Inlet. And he can build a snow house.” That same year, having saved enough money to move from the Northwest Territories down south to Toronto, Knapp enrolled at the Ontario College of Art, where he studied for the next two years until 1939, when Knapp had his first one-man show at the Picture Loan Society.
Later that year Knapp returned to the Northwest to live among the Inuit; “I believe I can interpret the life of the Eskimos because during my ten years in the Hudson Straits and Bay, I have lived with them worked, played, slept, ate and even starved with them” (The Montreal Standard, 1939). “Mr. Knapp will leave the McLean at one of the first isolated points the ship reaches and head for the interior with the Eskimos. He will travel by kayak, dog team and on foot, living exactly as the Eskimos do. He anticipate[s] lengthy treks over the barren wastes carrying a 100 pound sketch box” (The Montreal Standard, 1939). The following year in 1940, Knapp returned again to Toronto to have another one-man show at Eaton’s Fine Art Galleries, which was well received.
With the outbreak of the second World War, Knapp enlisted in the army as a private, and later transferred to the RCAF. Following the war, Knapp made a third trip up north to continue his work. By this point in his career as an artist, Knapp was recognized for his art and knowledge of the Northwest, and in 1945 he traveled to Edmonton to address members of the Edmonton Museum of Arts on Inuit art. Around this time, Knapp married to Frances Livingstone, daughter of Allan C. Livingstone of Whitehorse. In 1949, Knapp was appointed Indian Agent at Fort Vermilion.
Although little is known of Knapp’s life following, of note is that his first oil done in Frobisher Bay, which he initially gifted to Southam, was later given to the Public Archives of Canada by the Trustees of the Gallery due to the painting’s unique origin story and historical value. Knapp died in British Columbia in 1995.
