O-620

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painting (portrait)

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The Right Honourable Arthur Meighen

Portrait of Prime Minister Arthur Meighen

Prime Minister Arthur Meighen was born in St. Mary’s, Ontario in 1874. He was a lawyer and though he had a reputation as a scathing wit, his letter to artist Ernest Fosbery after viewing the official portrait was amiable. “Nothing could have been more pleasing to me than the remarkable attention you gave the painting and the very excellent likeness which you produced.”

Fosbery portrayed Meighen as the very model of a Conservative politician of his day, standing in a wood-panelled room, dressed in a subdued blue suit and red tie, his hand relaxing into his jacket right pocket and his expression impassive.

Ernest Fosbery

Ernest Fosbery’s art experience included the First World War in France, where he was reassigned as a Canadian war artist after he was injured in the Battle of the Somme. Born in Ottawa in 1874, he studied there and in Paris in the fin de siècle years. He taught art in Buffalo, New York and Ottawa, where his work included richly detailed etchings of the city, including Parliament Hill. He was so influential in the medium that the National Gallery has written that his death in 1960 was “the end of an era in etching in the capital.”