Tom Mathews (1920–2000)

Tom Mathews was a Canadian landscape painter based in Brampton, Ontario, whose career spanned nearly four decades and was defined by a sustained engagement with rural Ontario subject matter, technical versatility across multiple media, and a distinctive late-career pointillist approach. While not a nationally canonized figure, Mathews represents the steady, professional class of postwar Canadian artists whose work circulated widely through commercial galleries, art loan societies, and regional institutions, contributing meaningfully to Ontario’s visual record during a period of rapid social and environmental change.

Born in Montreal in 1920, Mathews came of age artistically during a formative period in Canadian art, when the legacy of the Group of Seven still shaped public taste and institutional expectations, but newer approaches to modernism and abstraction were beginning to emerge. From 1936 to 1939, he pursued formal art training in Montreal, studying at both the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School. In addition to institutional instruction, he undertook private studies with several local art masters, the last documented mentor being Jacques de Tonnancour, RCA. This combination of academic training and private mentorship provided Mathews with a solid foundation in drawing, composition, and colour theory—skills that would underpin both his commercial and fine art practices.

Parallel to his development as a painter, Mathews worked extensively in the graphic arts. Over the course of his early and mid-career, he was employed as a newspaper illustrator, display designer, and fine art lithographer. This professional work offered financial stability while sharpening his technical precision and visual clarity, qualities that would remain evident in his landscape painting. Unlike many contemporaries who moved decisively away from representation, Mathews retained a strong commitment to legibility, structure, and craftsmanship, even as his style evolved.

By the mid-20th century, Mathews had relocated to Peel County and settled in Brampton, Ontario, which became both his home and his primary source of artistic inspiration. His core subject was the Canadian rural landscape, particularly the farms, fields, woodlots, and maple sugar bushes of Peel County and its surrounding areas. Over roughly forty years, he produced a substantial body of work chronicling these environments, often emphasizing seasonal change, atmospheric light, and the quiet rhythms of agricultural life. At a time when suburban expansion was rapidly transforming the region, Mathews’ paintings functioned as both aesthetic objects and records of a disappearing rural character.

In 1959, Mathews was elected a member of the Ontario Institute of Painters (OIP), marking a significant moment of professional recognition and affirming his standing among Ontario’s community of working artists. He exhibited regularly throughout the Greater Toronto Area and surrounding regions, with works shown and sold through venues such as the Port Credit Gallery, Oakville galleries including Four Winds Gallery, and Eaton’s Fine Art Galleries in Toronto—one of the most important commercial art outlets in mid-century Canada. His paintings also circulated through the Port Credit Art Loan Society, increasing public exposure, and were exhibited at the Peel County Museum and Art Gallery in Brampton during the 1970s. In addition, he participated periodically in exhibitions associated with the Ontario Society of Artists.

Among his notable achievements, one of Mathews’ paintings depicting a Peel County maple sugar bush—one of his most favoured motifs—was selected for display at Ontario House in London, England, which served as an international showcase for the province’s cultural life. This placement reflects the degree to which his work was seen as representative of Ontario’s regional identity during the period.

Mathews resigned from the Ontario Institute of Painters in 1967, for reasons that remain undocumented, though he continued to paint actively and exhibit professionally. Around this time, he also made a decisive shift in his career path. Although he taught art for approximately seven years, he ultimately concluded that teaching limited the time he could devote to his own work. He left teaching to pursue painting full time, while maintaining ties to the graphic arts industry, a decision that allowed him to sustain a steady studio practice well into later life.

Stylistically, Mathews remained rooted in realism and Impressionism for much of his career, but his work was not static. In his later years, he developed a highly personal pointillist technique, characterized by small, dot-like brush marks that recall Georges Seurat’s post-Impressionist method, adapted to the tonalities and spatial rhythms of mid-century Ontario landscapes. This approach lent his rural scenes a heightened sense of vibration and surface texture, distinguishing his later work from more conventional regional landscape painting. While abstraction was never central to his practice, he did occasionally venture into abstract impressionism.

Technically, Mathews was accomplished across oils, acrylics, and watercolours, moving comfortably between media depending on scale, subject, and desired effect. This versatility contributed to the breadth of his output and made his work accessible to a wide audience of collectors.

Mathews remained based in Brampton for the duration of his career, continuing to paint and exhibit into the 1990s. He died in Brampton in 2000, leaving behind a substantial body of work that remains closely associated with Peel County and its surrounding landscapes.

Within the broader context of Canadian art, Mathews exemplifies the mid-tier postwar artist—working outside the spotlight of movements such as Painters Eleven, yet essential to the texture and continuity of Ontario’s visual culture. His landscapes, particularly those employing his late pointillist technique, stand as quiet, skillful meditations on place, memory, and the changing face of the Canadian countryside.