Okanagan Valley

Walter J. Phillips

1884 - 1963

LorneOne of Canada’s leading printmakers in the 1920s and 1930s, Walter J. Phillips was also a landscape artist, teacher and critic. Born in England, Phillips studied art in Birmingham before moving to Winnipeg in June 1913. While there, he became the city’s chief art critic, writing a regular art column for the Winnipeg Herald. In 1926, he helped establish the Manitoba Society of Artists.

In 1940, Phillips took up a teaching position at the Banff School of Art where he taught until 1959. The flowering of printmaking on the Prairies can be attributed to Phillips’s presence at both these schools.

Between 1926 and his retirement to Victoria in 1960, he was a frequent visitor to British Columbia. A series of 32 watercolors he painted to illustrate the book Colour in the Canadian Rockies now belong to the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

Okanagan Valley portrays the visit of a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman to a native community in this beautiful valley of the Canadian west.