Biography from AskART:
| Alexander Young Jackson was best known as one of the members of the Group of Seven, the famous group of Canadian painters. Born in Montreal, he started working at age twelve after his father abandoned the family of six children. The young Jackson went to work as an office boy for a Montreal printing company, where he received his earliest training.
In 1906, he attended art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. One year later Jackson traveled to Europe on a cattle boat, remaining in Paris to study at the Academie Julian until 1912. He decided to become a professional painter after studying Impressionism in Paris.
He returned to Canada and settled in Montreal. He often took sketching and painting trips to the near by countryside. Back in Toronto, an artist by the name of J.E.H. MacDonald contacted Jackson about a painting he had seen earlier in a Toronto exhibition. Jackson soon developed a friendship with MacDonald and was thus linked to the Toronto and it's artists. Jackson had a great sense of adventure, and in 1913 Lawren S. Harris talked Jackson into spending the entire summer painting around Georgian Bay.
He also took trips every spring to Quebec and the Canadian Arctic. In the fall he returned to his art studio in the Studio Building in the winter he painted canvases. He lived in Toronto until 1955 and was involved in the local art scene into his eighties.
Source:
"Masterpieces of Canadian Art" by David Burnett
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Alexander Jackson is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Impressionists Pre 1940
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