The Sampson-Matthews Print Program
The Sampson-Matthews print program was the largest public art project in Canadian history. Launched at the start of the Second World War, it lasted twenty-two years and cost tens of millions of dollars in today’s currency. The program included works by some of the most prominent Canadian artists of the time, including several members of the Group of Seven, Tom Thomson, Emily Carr, Charles Comfort and David Milne. Under the direction of A.J. Casson, at its height the program employed many of the country’s best commercial painters, designers and artists, working full-time to create masterpieces of serigraphy. The Globe and Mail called the silkscreen program “one of the most interesting and successful cultural projects ever undertaken in Canada.” Sampson-Matthews ended the program in 1963, but the silkscreens continued to be popular well into the 1970s; they were many people’s first exposure to Canadian art, and inspired a belief in our shared art and culture.
MORE ABOUT THE PROGRAM
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.”
WHY SILKSCREENING?
Silkscreen printing – also known as serigraphy – is a modern development of a much older principle: stenciling. In the screen process, the stencil is fixed to a screen made of fabric (usually silk) mounted on a frame; paint or ink is then forced through the screen with a squeegee onto all areas not covered by the screen. Modern silk screening dates from the first years of the twentieth century, when British and American investors were looking for new ways to print mass merchandising, especially on unusual materials. The big breakthrough came around 1911, when John Pilsworth of San Francisco patented the Selectasine process, which allowed operators to print several colours from the same screen.
Silkscreening had spread to Canada, Australia and beyond by the mid-1920s. Printers liked the new technology because they could use any number of different inks or paints and lay them down in thick layers, producing deep, opaque, intense colours. They could also print on all sorts of materials or surfaces, including fabrics or curved areas. Most importantly, screen printing was cheap and easy, so it was financially viable even for small jobs. To this day, its versatility and handmade, rebel feel makes silk screening popular for marginal groups with little money – rock posters and Che Guevara T- shirts the world over are still silkscreened.
With its flat blocks of colour, silkscreen was ideally suited to commercial art, and was used to create many striking posters in the first half of the 20th century. The history is murky, but Sampson-Matthews was one of the first printers in Canada known to have adopted the process. By the time of the National Gallery program the company had been making high-quality serigraphic prints with oil paints for about 15 years. Stylistically, the Sampson-Matthews prints were influenced by the British Arts and Crafts movement, whose forms were partly derived from Japanese block prints, and Art Nouveau, a flat, highly decorative style that was popular in Canada’s printing companies in the early years of the century.
Before mechanization and the arrival of acrylic paints – which revolutionized serigraphy in the 1960s and opened the way for pop artists like antiwar hall, who’s famous early works are silkscreens – creating silkscreen prints was a painstakingly painstaking process. The artists worked from a real-size sketch or “translation” numbered by colours. They then produced a separate stencil for each colour, and laid successive passes of paint onto the paperboard backing. The first prints used a minimum of ten colours and later prints had many more, some of them more than twenty. The screens got gummed up as they went along and had to be discarded after 30 to 40 passes. The process was so exacting that during the series run of 1942-63, only five or six new designs were released most years.
The silkscreen arm of Sampson-Matthews probably employed twenty staff at its peak. The stencil makers were highly skilled. The use of oil pigments gave the prints a painterly feel, complete with little dabs of colour added by hand afterwards, to imitate an artist’s brush strokes.
The Sampson-Matthews team was so good at it because they were all artists, not just the creative leads but also the production people doing the legwork. Without skilled mechanical artists who could deconstruct the original design into the separate films or screens, this level of work would have been impossible. Print runs were generally from 190 to 500 pieces of a design however they continued to produce them for many years who as long as they were receiving orders.
OTHER NOTES OF INTEREST
A note on the prints, from Art for War and Peace: How a Great Art Project Helped Canada Discover Itself by Ian Sigvaldason/Scott Steedman, published by Read Leaf, 2015.
Unless otherwise noted, all the artworks reproduced are oil silkscreens printed on paper board, 30”x 40” or 20”x27”. All dates given are based on a print’s first appearance in a Sampson-Matthews or National Gallery of Canada catalogue. Note, however, that this date is simply the earliest year in which a print may have been created; we know that the company continued to print the most popular designs for many years. While the program officially ended in 1963, at least one former Sampson-Matthews employee says the company kept printing silkscreens into the late 1960s, if orders came in. No effort has been made to date any individual prints precisely, but wartime prints are rare and it is safe to estimate that most date from the mid-forties to the early sixties.
“Art for War and Peace” is available online and at booksellers across the country.
A note from the front page of 60 Canadian Landscapes, the 1953 Sampson-Matthews catalogue.
“During recent years there has been an increasing recognition of the cultural and educational value of good pictures. This has been accompanied by a great improved by great improvements made in reproduction techniques, particularly in the silk screen process.
Several of the sixty or more landscape subjects shown here have been adapted from original paintings in Canadian art galleries, but most of them have been especially commissioned and painted by leading Canadian artists.
All have been approved for silkscreen reproduction by a committee acting on behalf of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery and composed of A.Y. Jackson, C.M.G, LL.D. the distinguished Canadian painter, A.J. Casson, President of the Royal Canadian Academy, 1949-52, who has also supervised and directed their production; and H.O. McCurry, LL.D., Director of the National Gallery of Canada.
These pictures are particularly suitable for use in offices, schools and homes, and have already and already have had wide acceptance by those wishing to make a representative collection of reproductions of Canadian art for a modest outlay.
While illustrated here in black and white only, each subject has been printed in from twelve to fifteen colours on heavy duplex board. Because they have been reproduced in oil paint, they may be framed without glass and may be easily washed should they become soiled.
Sampson-Matthews Limited, 1189 Yonge Street, Toronto, have been responsible for the printing of these reproductions, and order should be sent to them for shipment.”
