JEH MacDonald, Designer: An Anthology of Graphic Design, Illustration and Lettering

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

J.E.H. MacDonald (1873–1932) is known as a founding member of the
Group of Seven and a magnificent landscape painter. He is much less
known as a master graphic designer, one of Canada’s first in the
field. This handsome book inaugurates a series of illustrated
biographies of leading Canadian graphic designers.

The book itself is a model of superior graphic design, with its fine
layout and deep-blue endpapers. In addition to chapters on commerce,
culture, illustration, lettering, bookplates, and designs for the Arts
and Letters Club of Toronto, there is a detailed chronology, which
extends past the artist’s death to cover publications and exhibitions
up to 1996. As a senior designer at Toronto’s most prestigious
commercial studio, Grip Ltd., MacDonald designed bookplates for
individual libraries, book covers, signs, certificates, exhibition
catalogues, and plaques. The personal bookplates, tailored to suit the
taste of the individual collectors, are particularly fascinating. The
lettering section shows what society has lost by ceasing to think of
calligraphy as an art.

Robert Stacey is a Toronto-based art and design historian, exhibition
curator, editor and writer. His brief but highly informative text is the
product of 20 years of research—work initially undertaken by the late
Hunter Bishop, archivist of the Arts and Letters Club. Taken as a whole,
this book greatly enlarges our understanding not only of MacDonald as a
painter but also of Canadian art and art history. MacDonald, whose credo
in life and art was “The Harmony of Means and Purpose,” would have
been pleased.