Artist’s style still echoes on prairie
After emigrating from Lancashire and setting up a homestead near Lashburn, Augustus Kenderdine didn’t paint for nearly a decade.
It was only in 1918 that the 48-year-old Frenchtrained artist abandoned his plow and picked up his paintbrush again.
Over the next 19 years, Kenderdine would establish himself as one of the province’s most important artists: A painter whose best work used European form and technique to capture sweeping, dramatic images of the Saskatchewan landscape’s untamed beauty.
His best works are at once vivid and fleeting — brief moments of stunning beauty preserved on canvas but already fading into the past.
Kenderdine — who painted for years before moving to Canada — was more than just a landscape artist prepared to paint portraits on commission. He was also integral in the development of the province’s arts community, and especially fine arts programs at universities in Saskatoon and Regina.
In the mid-1930s, Kenderdine helped establish what became the U of S’s Emma Lake campus, a beloved — and now-shuttered — retreat where generations of artists spent countless hours and days trying to recapture the stunning beauty of his finest paintings.
Kenderdine was born in Manchester in 1870 and brought his family with him to Saskatchewan. He died in 1947. Today, “Gus” Kenderdine’s works are fixtures in many prominent art collections in Saskatchewan and across Canada. A street in Saskatoon and a gallery on the U of S campus also bear his name.
Perhaps more important, the tradition he and a few other artists established continues to echo across the Saskatchewan prairie.