Today, few Canadians have heard of Homer Ransford Watson. In his day, however, Watson was one of the most prominent artists in Canada. He was called the "Canadian Constable" because his paintings were compared so favourably to the famous British artist John Constable. Queen Victoria owned his paintings, as did other leading figures in Britain and Canada, such as Oscar Wilde (the famous author) and Lord Strathcona (the Railway magnate). Watson was a strong supporter of Canadian art. He helped to found the Canadian Art Club in Toronto in order to promote the work of Canadian artists whom, he felt, Canadians themselves were neglecting.

Watson was born in Doon, Ontario in 1855. He grew up in a region that was still very much rural and agricultural, but as a boy and young adult, Watson was more interested in art than farming. When he was still young, an aunt gave him an art set as a present, but aside from what he could teach himself Watson had little formal training. At the age of nineteen, he moved to Toronto where he came into contact with a number of artists and decided to pursue a career in the arts. Watson soon left for New York where he briefly studied the techniques of American artists before returning to Ontario where he began to exhibit his paintings in 1878. Almost immediately, Watson's art attracted the attention of prominent people. The Marquis of Lorne -- then Governor General of Canada -- purchased one of his works as a gift for Queen Victoria who liked it so much she bought two more canvases.

After the Rain painted in 1883 is a good example of Watson's art. Like most of his mature work, this painting is a piece of refined and careful craftsmanship showing careful attention to detail. This painting has a photographic-like quality. Watson's aim seemed to be to create a near exact image of the countryside, as one might today with a camera. In terms of colour, Watson made considerable use of greens and browns, creating a sedate feel to his work. The painting itself, like many of Watson's paintings, depicts a country scene in the vicinity of Doon, his home town. It is a picture of a farm after a rainfall. Looking at this painting, we can see the plowed field, note the fences in the middle background, and see that the trees in the field have been cleared to make way for farming.

Sometimes paintings such as After the Rain are called pastoral, and this style of painting pastoralism. This term refers to paintings which present picturesque vignettes of the countryside. For nineteenth-century artists like Watson, wild or untamed landscapes were considered depressing or dangerous, and nature reached its highest stage of picturesque beauty only when forests had been cleared, meadows or fields created or cultivated, and farms established. The painting After the Rain illustrates these qualities.

Watson considered himself a Canadian artist and he worked to promote the arts in Canada. In addition to helping create the Canadian Art Club (CAC), he served as its president for four years. Under his direction, the CAC tried to promote the work of Canadian artists by introducing it to the Canadian public. From 1918 until 1921, Watson also served as president of the Royal Canadian Academy (the leading arts organization in Canada). By the 1920s, however, Watson's pastoral style of painting was being pushed to the sidelines by new developments in Canadian art. In 1920, the Group of Seven, who painted in a style very different from Watson's, held its first exhibition. The Group of Seven's avowed purpose was to create a new, more Canadian style of painting. The problem with Canadian artists, so claimed the members of the Group of Seven, was that their artistic style derived from European sources.

Watson responded ambiguously to the emergence of the Group of Seven. He did not feel that his style of painting was un-Canadian and he wondered about the Group of Seven's vigorous nationalism. Watson wanted to distance Canadian art from the art of Europe, but he did not necessarily believe that the Group's aggressive nationalism was a good thing for Canadian art. "All of this talk of Canadianism," he told the Group of Seven, "seems hence to be foolish. Things form naturally and not by forcing." This, Watson felt, was the problem with the new Canadian art. It tried too hard to be Canadian and in the process lost its artistic quality. His style of painting, Watson maintained, was Canadian because it was based on Canadian scenes. The pastoral style, he might have said, was indeed of European origin, but Canadians had produced their own unique variants of this style by painting Canadian scenes.

Watson continued to paint in the 1920s and maintained his interest in the arts into the 1930s but deafness began to limit his activities. He died in 1936, feeling, as one art historian has said, "that the modern world passed him by." This may not be entirely true. Near the end of his life, Watson was thinking about new and different ways of painting and was still exploring Canada in search of new subjects to paint. He made, for example, a sketching trip to the Rocky Mountains. His days as a leading artist in Canada were, however, numbered as Canadian painting began to develop in a different direction.