![William Blair Bruce - Landscape with Poppies [1887]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7100/26481956724_b995cb8e09_b.jpg)
William Blair Bruce was born October 8, 1859 in Hamilton, Upper Canada. A career which might easily have produced the most important body of paintings by a Canadian in the impressionist manner was fractured. Despite a considerable output and many fine paintings from his later years, especially portraits of his wife and twilight views of Stockholm and the sea, his reputation suffered from the wide variety of his subjects (portraits, landscapes, genre, mythology, and the nude) and, more significantly, the eclecticism of his style (vacillating between impressionism and the academism of his early career with overtones of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, the Barbizon School, and Scandinavian romanticism).
[Art Gallery of Ontario - Oil on canvas, 27.3 x 33.8 cm]