Bertram Richard Brooker 1888 - 1955

Private Collection, Toronto

Important Canadian Art, Sotheby's (Canada), 1999 (lot 101)

Private Collection, Spain

Betram Brooker grew up in Croydon U.K., emigrating to Portage-du-Prairie, Manitoba in 1905 at 17 years of age.  Moving to Toronto in 1921, Brooker quickly became the Editor-in-Chief of Marketing Magazine. He purchased the business in 1924, only to sell it in 1926 in order to experience the freedom that freelance journalism had to offer.

In tandem with his writing career, Brooker worked as an artist and was heavily influenced by the ideas of Group of Seven member, Lawren Harris, whom he met as a member of the Arts & Letters Club in Toronto.  Harris introduced Brooker to Kandinsky's theories of spirituality and music in abstract art, and it was with these ideas that Brooker began his first serious painting.  Brooker went on to become one of the founding members of the Canadian Group of Painters, and was known as a pioneer of abstract painting in Canada.

Thick Stem reveals the dynamism and flow that was Brooker's mark.