Station and Grain Elevator

G. Campbell Tinning

1910 - 1996

(George) Campbell Tinning was best known for his watercolors and official Second World War paintings. Born in Saskatoon, Tinning studied widely, first in Winnipeg and Regina and then, in 1938, at the Eliot O’Hara Watercolor School at Goose Rocks, Maine and at the Art Students’ League of New York. He settled in Montréal in 1939.

After his time in Europe as an official war artist, Tinning returned to Montréal where he was employed for two decades as an illustrator by a Ford Motor Company magazine. The publication sent him on assignments across Canada as well as around the world. Either on his own or for his employer, he painted landscapes from the British Columbia interior to Newfoundland outports.

A two-time winner of the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts prestigious Jessie Dow Prize, Tinning’s war paintings were a key element in numerous group exhibitions during the 1980s and 1990s.

In Station and Grain Elevator, Tinning depicts an iconic Saskatchewan subject. Grain elevators alongside railroad tracks throughout the Prairies formed the origin or focal point for farming communities. The elevators served farmers who needed to store grain after harvest and later send it to market.