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Arthur Lismer – Canadian Artist and Interpreter of the Sea

Arthur Lismer sign

by John MacFarlane 2012

Arthur Lismer, painter and educator, was born at Sheffield, England on 27 June 1885. He found work as a commercial artist at the Grip Ltd. He is best known for his work with the Group of Seven and is one of the best known of the Canadian artists. He painted the coast and marine habitats each summer from 1951 at Long Beach, on Vancouver Island. He stayed in a small cabin behind the Wickaninnish Inn on Wickaninnish Bay.

The beach was (and is) known as Long Beach and is now a part of Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. Lismer lived in a small cabin which still displayed a stump of a canoe paddle unofficially designating it as Lismer Cottage when I saw it in 1971. The whole group of cottages was torn down soon after (about 1971) when Parks Canada took over the property to redevelop it into the Wickaninnish Interpretation Centre which still operates there today. Lismer died at Montreal Quebec on March 23rd, 1969. His paintings of the sea still thrill art lovers.

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Site News: December 29, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,901 vessel histories (with 16,289 images and 13,934 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

Vessel records are currently being reviewed and updated with more than 45,000 processed so far this year (2024).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3997 images).

Thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he continues to contribute to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

My very special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

Thanks to John Spivey who is beginning his 4th year of fact checking the entries in the vessel database.

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