Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour

The Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour (in French: La Société Canadienne de Peintres en Aquarelle), founded in 1925 is considered to be Canada’s official national water colour Society. Since the 1980s the Society has enjoyed Vice-regal Patronage from the incumbent Governor-General of Canada. Recognized by a long list of international exhibitions it is the Canadian equivalent of such other national societies as the American Watercolor Society of the United States, the Royal Watercolour Society of the United Kingdom, etc.

The nation’s oldest medium-specific arts organization has had an illustrious history. Membership is looked upon as a mark of achieving peer recognition in one of the most difficult and demanding visual arts form.

The elected members are entitled to use the Society’s initials CSPWC (in French: SCPA) after their names.

There is probably justification for including some of the indigenous peoples as early users of versions of watercolour in their artwork and crafts. Using local materials and chemicals they certainly approximated the watercolour medium in some of their pigments and dyes while really not having any practical reason for exploring any inherent transparent qualities.

The first recorded use of a European trained watercolourist working within what is today Canadian territory is believed to be the works of John White who accompanied the expeditions of Sir Martin Frobisher in the 1570s. Another early example of a gifted watercolourist working in the same region would be Samuel de Champlain who first arrived in 1603. Historically art-trained officers or cartographers were dispatched by both the French and British governments to assist in the preparation of vitally important maps of these newly claimed lands and to record geographical features. There is a surviving wealth of early watercolours from this period which record landscape features and early settlements. Eagerly collected in today's art markets the best are notably housed in Library and Archives Canada, the National Gallery of Canada and the Royal Ontario Museum.

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