Frank Panabaker
Renowned Canadian artist was born in Hespeler
By David Menary
The late Canadian artist Frank Panabaker was among the country’s most eminent artists during the middle of the twentieth century, but as a young man, he almost gave up painting for good.
Born in Hespeler, Ontario (now part of Cambridge) in 1904, he followed his passion for art after graduating from Galt Collegiate Institute, studying drawing and painting at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto.
His father had initially encouraged him to paint by buying him a box of oil colours for Christmas when he was a boy. He was, at the time, an impressionable lad; the first paintings he ever recalled seeing were at the old Mennonite church in Hespeler.
“I had no idea that anyone could produce things so beautiful,” he recalled years later. “It was a thrilling moment, and seldom have I experienced anything like it. It was an authentic revelation.”
When he acquired the tools of the painter’s craft—a handsome box full of colours like jewels, an assortment of brushes, turpentine and panels—he walked up the river road beside the Speed River to paint. It was a sunny, summer day and he found a quiet place where he could paint in solitude. The only other living soul to see him paint his masterpiece was a nearby red-winged blackbird.
But even after trying to hone his craft, and studying at the Ontario College of Art, he grew discouraged. The world of art was so wide and the more he painted and got to know the world of art, the more he grew discouraged, believing he could never master it.
So he abandoned art to study at Valparaiso University in Indiana. Returning to Hespeler from his sojourn in Indiana, he sought out eminent Canadian artist Homer Watson of Doon.
Watson, who died in 1936, was once described as the first painter to paint Canada as Canada, rather than in the European style.
The Perspective of a wise old man
Talking with Homer Watson of Doon
By then, Watson was nearing the end of his life, but he told the young Panabaker something that profoundly altered the course of his fledgling career.
“I am an old man and just beginning to get hold of a few things,” said Watson. “I would like to start over.”
Those few humble words, coming from an old man widely considered to be among his generation's greatest Canadian landscape artists, inspired Panabaker.
Panabaker felt there might yet be hope for his ambition to be an artist, and so he returned to his passion, studying at the Grand Central School of Art in New York and at the Art Students’ League in Manhattan, where many historically important artists attended dating to the 19th century, artists who contributed to numerous influential schools and movements in the art world.
Homer Ransford Watson (1855-1936) was a noted Canadian landscape painter. M.O. Hammond (1876-1935).
President Roosevelt owned a Panabaker
His works grace public and private collections
The school's motto Nulla Dies Sine Linea or "No Day Without a Line,” was attributed to the Greek painter Apelles by the historian Pliny the Elder, who wrote that Apelles would not let a day pass without at least drawing a line to practice his art.
Driven by the same urge, Panabaker worked tirelessly, painting scenes across Canada, including western Canada, where he had a particular affinity for painting the Rockies, and the majestic Mount Assiniboine.
His works characteristically reveal rich colours to match various seasons and moods of brooding storm skies and silver clouds, though he was one of the few Canadian artists who could move easily from landscape to portraiture with equal confidence.
Today his paintings hang in many public and private collections around the world; his works also hang in many schools, including his old high school.
About 1934 he sold picture to President Roosevelt’s mother, who was visiting Canada and bought it for her son. It was a small painting and she wrote Panabaker a cheque for $40. The money didn’t matter as much to Panabaker as the sentiment about why she wanted to buy it, and for whom it was intended. So he carried the cheque around in his pocket for some time, in no particular hurry to cash it. “Her cheque…seemed more important to me than the money it represented,” admitted Panabaker.
Then one day his wife Katherine took a phone call from the cleaners. “Before cleaning your husband’s pants, we found a cheque in one of the pockets drawn on the Fifth Avenue office of the Guaranty Trust Company of New York. It is signed Sara D. Roosevelt. I guess you’d like it back?”
Several years later a Baptist minister from Galt, who once had a church near the summer home of the President, paid a visit to Panabaker. The Roosevelts’ beloved summer home, Campobello, was situated on a beautiful New Brunswick island in the Bay of Fundy. The clergyman and Roosevelt had become good friends and they used to sit on FDR’s porch on summer evenings discussing things as they looked out over the tidal waters of the Bay of Fundy.
“Last Easter,” wrote Panabaker, the minister “had gone to Washington to call on his old friend, now the President. He said he had been delighted to see my little picture hanging on the walls of a private sitting room in the White House.”
For Panabaker, each painting reminded him of a certain place and time. A canvas of Mount Assiniboine brought back memories of October in the mountains, when the snows had come early and he and his wife Katherine were holed up in a Rocky Mountain cabin so he could paint the mountain.
Another canvas he had painted on the extreme tip of Western Head, near Lockeport, Nova Scotia, brought back memories of the plangent waves smashing against the rocks, “and I could see the enormous plume of spray as it shot skyward.”
Once, he and fellow Canadian painter Fred Brigden were sketching for a week out of Eugenia Falls, on the Niagara Escarpment, and at the Inn where they stayed, they enjoyed a nightly T-bone steak.
“Like a great many males, I have had the secret conviction that I could be a good cook, even a great one, if only I had a chance to study the art,” wrote Panabaker. He was always enthralled about the backgrounds of great chefs, and the years they spent mastering their craft at the grand hotels of Europe.
One night, as they got back to the inn, darkness was setting in and snow was falling. The young couple who owned the inn had a young boy, and they needed to get to the nearest town before the bad weather came, so they asked the young artists if they could cook their own steaks that night.
Gage Park, Hamilton
The Artist had Dreams of Being a Chef
Panabaker’s mind ran rampant with thoughts of being an apprentice chef charged with creating sumptuous dinners for a wide assortment of famed guests. He donned the white chef’s hat and apron. Although the hydro crew had left that afternoon, the Women’s Auxiliary had called asking if they could cook their meals on short notice. Panabaker gladly accepted the challenge. His cooking partner, Fred, was 83, had arthritis and walked with a heavy stick.
The steaks were put on. Panabaker’s mind wandered. Perhaps he had missed his calling; instead of painting, he could have been a great chef.
Panabaker thought of his old friend, a chef who worked at a large Cape Cod summer hotel on the beach, where guests included notables such as actor Walter Pidgeon and Sarah Churchill. He envisioned Churchill telling her famous father, Sir Winston, that she had met a man who cooked and painted divinely.
The steaks simmered; he continued daydreaming as he and his fellow inn proprietor seemingly had matters well in hand. They awaited the arrival of the ladies from the Women's Auxiliary.
He imagined Winston cabling for Panabaker, the chef artist, to come to the Riviera so the two could cook and paint together.
Suddenly a door opened and Fred rushed in with a billow of smoke filling the room. “Fire,” he yelled. “Frank, the place is on fire. Rescue the boy upstairs!”
The innocent child of the hotel owners was asleep in his upstairs bedroom.
“Holy Mackerel,” shouted Panabaker. “The steaks.”
He rushed to the large stove. The steaks were shriveled charcoal. They doused the fire and saved the inn, and the boy.
“I wisely decided I had perhaps better stick to painting.”
His time painting in the Rockies was more memorable than the steaks. It was autumn, and the inn was closed for the season. He and his bride travelled by horse.
“A few days later we left Moraine Lake in the valley of the Ten Peaks and rode out to Lake Louise Station,” wrote Panabaker, “and then up the Bow Valley to within sight of the Bow Lakes. Our camp was high above the valley and the river. There were foregrounds of burnt timber, low brushes—red and yellow from early frost—and cloud shadows that made patterns in the valley and on the mountain on the other side. Every evening two mule deer came and watched our small fire from a distance.”
Walking and climbing to the top of a 10,000-foot ridge, they saw alpine flowers growing out of patches of snow, and there, 50 miles distant, but no less majestic given the miles, was Mount Assiniboine, shimmering gloriously.
Despite the cold, and roughing it high in the Rockies, in tents and cold cabins, he never felt so alive as when he was painting all he saw onto canvas.
Learn More
Frank Shirley Panabaker was an accomplished Canadian landscape painter who was able to move from landscape to portraiture with ease.