Like many details of the Sampson-Matthews program, its exact origins are unclear. But all sources agree that four men were key figures in the first, wartime phase of the project: A.Y. Jackson, H.O. “Harry” McCurry, director of the National Gallery of Canada; Charles “Chuck” Matthews, general manager and vice president of Sampson-Matthews; and A.J. Casson, chief designer at Sampson-Matthews and another member of the Group of Seven. Of the four, Jackson and McCurry seem to have the best claim to be called the project’s instigators.

Jackson believed the program would revolutionize the country’s art market and provide much-needed exposure and income for artists, who had struggled to make a living all through the Depression. McCurry, a friend and confidant, shared Jackson’s belief in the spiritual power of art – particularly if that art was truly Canadian, that is, the sort of wild, unpeopled northern landscapes espoused by the Group of Seven. Both men compared the program to the Works Projects Administration, the great New Deal program instituted in the United States in the depths of the Depression that had given work to hundreds of hard-pressed American artists.

Jackson had served as an official artist in the First World War, painting powerful scenes of ravaged battlefields. He was too old to enlist when the new war started, and spent time wondering how an artist could best serve his country. He wrote several letters to McCurry at the National Gallery discussing this issue, in one proposing that “artists paint and donate to the services works which could be reproduced by sponsors.” This was the kernel of the Sampson-Matthews program

The silkscreen project was a natural fit for the National Gallery, which saw its twin missions as nation building and the creation of a common cultural heritage for all Canadians. The gallery had run a more modest program in the early decades of the century, distributing thousands of small lithographs of famous paintings to schools across the country, accompanied by leaflets written by yet another member of the Group of Seven, painter Arthur Lismer. The new program fit Lismer’s earlier belief, that “Prints of Canadian pictures, wisely used, will go far in establishing a knowledge and love for the work of our own artists and the country.”

The original target market of the new program was the Canadian armed forces. Jackson remembered how drab army camps were, but had rejected the idea of donating original artworks to brighten them up, as the logistics were impossible, and he feared the art would never be seen again. So why not use colourful silkscreen prints instead? These could be circulated to military bases across Canada and even around the world, to stir the hearts and brighten the lives of all the men and women in arms. And there was a second agenda from the start: get the government and corporate sponsors to fund the printmaking process, then expanded as soon as possible to include schools and “club rooms” across the country. The economics are unclear, but the original plan was for the artist to donate their work for the war prints but received small royalties from other sales.

In a letter to McCurry from June 1942, Jackson wrote that, “If we can get twenty or thirty typical examples of Canadian art scattered through all the camps in Canada we will have accomplished a lot -cheered up the camps and made the boys familiar with our work for the first time in their lives.” It was a modest goal, and meeting it turned out to be just the first step in a far-reaching public art program.

By 1941, Toronto based Sampson-Matthews limited had established itself as the finest colour printer in the country, with a reputation for high-quality posters and art reproductions, notably using the relatively new process of silkscreen printing. Sampson-Matthews had started out doing letterpress and lithographic printing, then added silkscreen printing in the early 1920s, making it one of the first printers in Canada to use this colourful, affordable new technique. For the next four decades it was a leader in the fast-growing fields of advertising, printing and publishing with one of the best art studios and some of the most up-to-date printing presses in Canada.

Charles Matthews was happy to get his firm involved in the silkscreen program after A.Y. Jackson had pitched it to him. His “attitude was that they would much sooner work on a problem of this kind than the ordinary run of commercial art,” Jackson wrote to McCurry in 1942. A.J. Cassonhad been promoted to head of the art department at Sampson-Matthews in 1932 when Franklin Carmichael left to firm to accept a teaching position at the Ontario College of Art. A highly skilled designer, painter and watercolourist, Casson would oversee the silkscreen program from its inception in 1942 until his retirement in 1958.

Casson and his team in the art department – which included Sydney Hallam, Tom McLean, both accomplished painters – did the laborious work of translating the design into a series of screens, one for each colour. This was not an easy task, as Casson explained:

“You had to get the feel of the painting in a flat colour. A.Y. Jackson, stood Hallam, Tom McLean and I worked on them. Tom did most of the translations. He was a sidekick of Tom Thompson’s in the early days when they were Rangers together. But I made the first test one, of an old house in Elora on the main street”.

Finding sponsors

A key aspect of the wartime program was that corporate sponsors would cover the printing costs. This policy suited all parties, for different reasons: the National Gallery was grateful because their budget had been decimated at the war’s outbreak; Sampson-Matthews was pleased because it brought them new clients; Jackson was content because it meant that private institutions were paying artists to make art; and the federal government and the armed forces were happy because they could provide logistics but no funding. One caveat to the sponsorship program was that J.W.G. Clark, a public relations officer in the Department of National Defence, agreed to the arrangement “providing the liquor interests took no part in it; he said some people would raise a howl if they did.”