Artist Information
Artist
John A. Vanderpant, RPS (1884-1939)Role
PhotographerArtist
Royal B.C. Museum and ArchivesRole
PrintmakerDate made
2015Time Period
20th Century, 21st CenturyNotes
PHOTOGRAPHER BIOGRAPHY
Born in the Netherlands, John A. Vanderpant was a Dutch-Canadian photographer, a significant member of the International Modernist photography movement in Canada. Also a gallery owner and author, he was a champion of the arts and forceful catalyst in Vancouver and beyond during the 1920s and 1930s.
From 1905 to 1912, Vanderpant studied at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University. He also published poetry and worked as a photojournalist. With his wife, he immigrated to Canada in 1911, and opened three photographic studios in Alberta. In 1919 he settled in New Westminster, B.C. running a successful portrait business. During the interwar years his portraits were considered among the best in Canada. In these early years he met photographer Harry Upperton Knight (1873-1973), whose pictorial style inspired him to strive for a “painterly" effect, and he began to photograph landscapes and ordinary objects. Vanderpant strongly advocated for photography as art, and he became an active and successful participant in international salons. In 1920, he founded the New Westminster Photographic Salon as part of the Fine Arts Gallery of the British Columbia Annual Provincial Exhibition, which ran from 1923 to 1929. This was the only international salon in Western Canada during the 1920s. In addition, he promoted the exhibitions of art by B.C. and Canadian artists, including the Group of Seven. From 1925 to 1934, solo exhibitions of his work toured Canada, the United States, and Europe.
In 1928, Vanderpant, in partnership with Harold Mortimer-Lamb, opened the Vanderpant Galleries at 1216 Robson Street in Vancouver, BC (the partnership ended in 1929). Under Vanderpant’s influence, the gallery became a centre of art, music, and poetry for the city. Painters such as Emily Carr (1871-1945), A. Y. Jackson (1882-1974), Max Maynard (1903-1982), Frederick Varley (1881-1969), and W. P. Weston (1873-1973) exhibited there. And arts groups, such as the British Columbia Art League, the Vancouver’s Arts and Letters Club, and the Vancouver Poetry Society (Vanderpant was a member of all three) met there. And in 1931, Vanderpant organized the probable first Canadian showing of prints by the American “Group F/64” photographers Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) and Edward Weston (1886-1958).
Vanderpant stated that his main influences had been the works of the American photographers Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), Edward Steichen (1879-1973), and Clarence Hudson White (1871-1925). Vanderpant began as a pictorialist photographer; however, over time, he developed a unique style as his work moved from soft focus to bolder and more modernist compositions. During the mid-1920s he began photographing grain elevators, which have come to be seen as unique representations of Canada’s industrial architecture.
In 1926, Vanderpant was honoured to be named a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. The Vancouver Art Gallery held displays of his prints in 1932 and 1937 and a retrospective in 1940. In 1976 the National Gallery of Canada sponsored a cross-country exhibition tour of his work. Today, Vanderpant’s work is held in collections across Canada, the Netherlands and the United States. As a result of financial difficulties and ill health, Vanderpant stopped making photographs around 1937, and he died in Vancouver at age fifty-five.
