Edward Frederick Hagell: The Legacy of a Southern Alberta Artist

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

Edward Frederick Hagell lived a peripatetic, hardscrabble existence
trying to make a living as an artist during the first half of the 20th
century. Born in 1895 to British immigrants who settled in Lethbridge,
he had a passion for drawing at an early age. His mother encouraged his
talent, but his only art training was in elementary school and a brief
commercial art course in Vancouver in 1937. His other passion was a love
of the Old West, as depicted by artists like Charlie Russell, whose
narrative style was so popular at the time. Both that style and subject
were reflected in Hagell’s own drawings and stories.

Hagell’s most prolific years coincided with the Depression, but his
attempts to make a living as a sign maker, show-card writer, window
dresser, and even dinnerware designer for the Stockman’s Inn in
Lethbridge were invariably short-lived. Always moving to find work, he
tried farming, running a dude ranch, training horses, and caretaking for
a dormitory in Pincher Creek. Occasionally, his works were exhibited at
the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Toronto, the Calgary
Stampede, and once, in 1935, at the Royal Canadian Academy. His
romanticized vision of the Old West was published in the London
Illustrated News (1932), while his stories and poetry appeared in
Vancouver and Calgary newspapers. In 1954, a book of his illustrated
short stories, When the Grass Was Free, was published. During the early
1960s, he received a commission to depict the history of Lethbridge and
southern Alberta, and another to commemorate the inventor of the
“Noble Plow.”

Although this slight book includes 19 pages of reproductions, the text
and photos put as much emphasis on the family history as on the artist.
Nevertheless, it conveys with authenticity the hardships of a close-knit
pioneer family whose son had artistic aspirations in an era that was so
different and so much further removed from our own than the passing of
only half a century would suggest. Recommended for western history
collections.