Kenneth Keith Forbes was born in 1892 in Toronto, Ontario. He studied art at the Newlyn School in the United Kingdom where he won a four-year scholarship to the Hospitalfield House School, Arbroath, Scotland. He won a Chase Scholarship in London with a portrait sketch and with that, attended the Slade School of Fine Art. By the young age of nineteen he had a portrait exhibited at the Royal Academy. As part of the Canadian War Memorials program, during World War I, Kenneth Keith Forbes served as a war artist for Canadian forces. In 1958, Forbes, Manley MacDonald (1889-1971), Victor Llewellyn Child, (1897-1960), Gordon Roy Conn (1887-1977) and others established the Ontario Institute of Painters, a group that supported traditional realist artists. Forbes was awarded the Thomas R. Proctor Prize for portraiture by the National Academy of Design, New York in 1932 and 1939. In 1967, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. His works are held by The Canadian War Museum and The House of Commons in Ottawa, Ontario among other institutions. Forbes died in Toronto on February 25, 1980.
1971
20th cent.
c 1960