Site Navigation:
Searchable Databases
Articles Archive
Pacific Nautical Heritage...
- Gallery of Light and Buoy Images
- Gallery of Mariners
- Gallery of Ship Images
- Gallery of Ship Wrecks
- Gallery of Monuments and Statues
- Gallery of Nautical Images
- Gallery of Freshwater Images
- Gallery of New Books
Canadian Naval Topics…
- Nautical History Videos
- UNTD
- British Columbia Heritage
- Arctic and Northern Nautical Heritage
- Western Canada Boat and Ship Builders
- Gallery of Arctic Images
- Reflections on Nautical Heritage
- British Columbia Heritage
Site Search:
Looking for more? Search for Articles on the Nauticapedia Site.
Arthur Lismer – Canadian Artist and Interpreter of the Sea
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.
Site News: November 20, 2024
The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,591 vessel histories (with 16,203 images and 13,900 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).
Vessel records are currently being reviewed and updated with more than 40,000 processed so far this year.
The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3996 images).
Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he has contributed 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.
Also my special thanks to my volunteer content accuracy checker, John Spivey of Irvine CA USA, who continues (almost every day for the last couple of years) to proof read thousands of Nauticapedia vessel histories and provided input to improve more than 14,000 entries. His attention to detail has been a huge unexpected bonus in improving and updating the vessel detail content.