(b London, 9 Jan 1838; d New York, 1 Jan 1898). English painter, active in North America. He received some artistic training in England before emigrating to British North America in 1858 and settling in Quebec. While sketching in the Eastern Townships during the 1860s and 1870s, he developed a preference for depicting landscape. In 1860 William Notman employed Fraser in his Montreal photography firm to tint portrait photographs, and in 1868 Fraser became a full partner in the Toronto branch. This early contact with photography greatly influenced his painting. He was a founder-member of the Society of Canadian Artists, Montreal, in 1867, of the Ontario Society of Artists, Toronto, in 1872 and a charter member of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1880. In 1883 he dissolved his partnership with Notman and by 1885 lived in Boston, MA, where he became a member of the Boston Art Club and the Boston Watercolor Society. Early in 1886 Sir George Stephen, President of the Canadian Pacific Railway, commissioned him to paint some views of the Rockies for London's Colonial and Indian Exhibition. Fraser based these on photographs by Alexander Henderson, given to him by Sir William Van Horne. In Fraser's watercolour Summit Lake near Lenchoile, Bow River, Canadian Pacific Railway (1886; Ottawa, N.G.), the cropped composition, telescoped space and schematic rendering of the distant mountains and foreground shore, juxtaposed with a more focused middle ground, clearly reveal its photographic source.
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