O-631

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painting (portrait)

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The Right Honourable Richard Bedford Bennett

Portrait of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett

R.B. Bennett was born into a poor family in Hopewell, New Brunswick in 1870, went to law school and built a law firm in Calgary, Alberta that made him one of the richest Canadians of his time. He lived in hotels, and never married. Many saw him as indifferent to the suffering of the Great Depression, though he was a generous philanthropist with his own fortune. He left a mark on Canada by establishing the Bank of Canada and the CBC.

Kenneth Forbes painted the portrait posthumously, and posed Bennett diligently at work, bearing a stern, even cold expression.

Kenneth Forbes

Kenneth Forbes was born in Toronto in 1892, and first studied art with his father, the portraitist John Colin Forbes. He also studied in England and Scotland, until he joined a British machine-gun corps to fight in the First World War. He was gassed and wounded, and twice mentioned in dispatches for gallantry. In 1917 he became a Canadian war artist, and his gripping painting Canadian Artillery in Action is on permanent display at the Canadian War Museum. Forbes was an outspoken foe of modern art and helped to establish the traditionally minded Ontario Institute of Painters.