Click image to enlarge

Sid Barron
1917 - 2005



	The Harbourmaster historical canadian 1992 SOLD 20 x 24 (in) tempra

Price Codes

Currency: Canadian Dollars

Code A

Below $1,000

Code B

$1,000 - $2,500

Code C

$2,500 - $5,000

Code D

$5,000 - $10,000

Code E

$10,000 - $20,000

Code F

$20,000 - $30,000

Code G

$30,000 - $50,000

Code H

$50,000 - $75,000

Code I

$75,000 - $999,999

Add to your profile and receive first notice when new works come available.

The Prices paid for all sold works are confidential. For Priceing details please call us at (250) 537-2421.

Barron was born in 1917 in Toronto after his mother fled to Canada. The two soon moved to Victoria where he lived most of his life.

Barron developed a lifelong fascination with boats, making obsessive scrapbooks of photographs and drawings of shipping on this coast.

At the age of 21 Barron met the precocious artist Allan Edwards, who gave him his first formal art lessons (in the company of Pierre Berton, among others). Soon he set his skills as a commercial artist.

Barron painted for the Union Steamships in Vancouver and designed boxes and neon signs, eventually moving to Toronto where the prospects for magazine illustration. During WWII he did war illustrations for the Toronto Star.

In the late 1950s, Victoria Daily Times publisher Stu Keate asked Barron if he could do cartoons. His style was topical but not political, akin to the British cartoonist Giles and Vancouver's Norris. In 1961 he went to Toronto and, with an introduction from Pierre Berton, was taken on by the Star as alternate to their popular Duncan Macpherson.

"There are only 10 plots for a cartoon," he later said. "I'd sit there staring at the drawing, and tears were falling on the drawing filling up the outlines." Creating those dense and articulate compositions sometimes took his mind "to another level," alienating those closest to him.

"Cartooning is a lonely road to go," he mused.

His Pictures and cartoons are now housed by the National Archives of Canada, and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

His paintings, and Jesi's, were for many years featured at the Gallery in Oak Bay Village. Barron's extensive oeuvre includes finely detailed portraits of cargo vessels, stylized scenes of freighters at anchor and sunny impressionist beach scenes.
A recent sale of his remaining original cartoons to the archives assured his place as a delightful and incisive observer of our times.

If you would like additional photos/information or to purchase this item, sell work by this artist or have a question please fill out this form: