O-444

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painting (portrait)

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The Honourable James Allison Glen

Portrait of Speaker James Allison Glen

James Allison Glen’s experience as Speaker was anything but ordinary. The Scottish-born lawyer, who lived in Manitoba, became Speaker early in the Second World War, when many policy issues were decided not by the House of Commons but by the Cabinet War Committee. There were extreme strictures on House business, from censoring the official transcript of Hansard to secret sittings, and there was more than usual co-operation between parties, which lightened the weight of the Speaker’s role. He left the chair in 1945 to join the Liberal cabinet, retired in 1948 and died in 1950. Kenneth Forbes painted his portrait c. 1945.

Kenneth Forbes

Kenneth Forbes was born in Toronto in 1892, and first studied art with his father, the portraitist John Colin Forbes. He also studied in England and Scotland, until he joined a British machine-gun corps to fight in the First World War. He was gassed and wounded, and twice mentioned in dispatches for gallantry. In 1917 he became a Canadian war artist, and his gripping painting Canadian Artillery in Action is on permanent display at the Canadian War Museum. Forbes was an outspoken foe of modern art and helped to establish the traditionally minded Ontario Institute of Painters.