Port de Grave

Franklin Arbuckle

1909 - 2001

Franklin Arbuckle is best known as an illustrator, especially for his Norman Rockwell-like magazine covers. Born in Toronto, Arbuckle attended the Ontario College of Art where he studied under Group of Seven member J.E.H. Macdonald. Upon graduation, he continued his association with the Group by marrying fellow artist Frances-Anne Johnston, the daughter of Group of Seven member Franz Johnston. Arbuckle taught at the elder Johnston’s summer school in Georgian Bay from 1932 to 1940.

During the 1940s and 1950s, he traveled across Canada, from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland, capturing bucolic scenes and historic subjects and sending them to Toronto for publication by Maclean’s, the country’s leading magazine.

In 1946 and 1947, Arbuckle won the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts Jessie Dow Prize, considered Canada’s most prestigious award for artists of works in oil and watercolor.

The town of Port de Grave is a more than 300-year old Newfoundland outport, some 50 miles outside the capital of St. John’s. The painting Port de Grave is said to be based on an earlier Arbuckle print called Lover’s Leap. Legend has it that a vengeful brother partially sawed off a rail above the sea where his sister and lover used to gaze out upon the ocean. When they leaned on the rail, as was their habit, it broke and the two plunged down the cliff. Both survived, but he was badly hurt and had to be carried by the young woman to safety. They later married, had a child but the man drowned shortly thereafter in a boating accident.