Artist

Sharp, George Lister Thornton

Title

Fraser River North Arm

Date

1928

Dimensions

22.0cm height x 32.3cm width

Type

drawing

Accession Number

2014.12.15

Collection

Permanent Collection

Gift of Harold and Linda Kalman

George Lister Thornton Sharp was one of the earliest and most successful architects in Vancouver’s history and a founding member, along with his partner Charles J. Thompson, of Sharp and Thompson, the longest surviving architectural firm in Vancouver (1908-1990). Although Sharp is remembered for such iconic structures as the University of British Columbia’s Gothic-style campus buildings (1912-1927), the original Art Deco Vancouver Art Gallery (1931), and the landmark Burrard Street Bridge (1932) he was also a reputed and prolific artist in his time and greatly influenced the development of art in Vancouver in the early 1900s. Although trained as an architect in his native England, Sharp also took classes in painting at the Royal Academy in London before immigrating to Canada in 1906 and settling in Vancouver in 1908. He began exhibiting artwork in Vancouver at least as early as 1909, when he was included in the First Annual Exhibition of the BC Society of Fine Arts, a group with whom Sharp exhibited extensively, contributing work to the first and the last exhibitions held by the Society, a remarkable span of almost sixty years of art. He also exhibited his work with the Island Arts & Crafts Society and at the first Vancouver Art Gallery on Georgia Street, where he had solo exhibitions in 1933 and 1935. In 1925, Sharp became the founding Director of the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, the first public art school in Vancouver known today as the distinguished Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Although he resigned after the first session, Sharp’s involvement in the opening of this institution demonstrates his importance to the rapid growth of the art community in Vancouver in the 1920s and to art history in BC.