FitzGerald’s career as an artist began in 1906 at the age of sixteen, but his role as an active printmaker did not start until 1922 when he was thirty-two years old.¹ This venture into a new medium was closely tied to a dramatic change in his approach to drawing.

During the winter of 1921-22, he attended the Art Students League in New York, and it was then that his drawing style was converted from an easy, quick, impressionistic clustering of lines to a slow, elegant, contour line which defined volumes in space.

Before the League, his rendering of trees, for example, was a generalized version of the idea of trees (Fig. 1). After the League, FitzGerald devoted himself to the rendering of the specifics of actual trees and other forms in space, using a contour line to delineate volume (41). It may be assumed that study with his two teachers, Boardman Robinson, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, had been responsible for this change in direction. Robinson had a reputation for treating each student differently, according to his needs, while Miller demanded “things in the round, whole and solid.”² There exists a small contour drawing by FitzGerald, of a limb of a tree or possibly of a body, on which he had lettered “Boardman Robinson” (20-0098 in fsc). This might be taken as an early response to his teacher’s suggestions on the use of the contour line. There has appeared no other actual documentation of the transformation.

The Art Students League may also have revealed to the new student the drawing possibilities inherent in the print; while there he produced four drypoints. The first of these he later inscribed “ny 1922 1st” (1) as if it were a milestone, as indeed it was. On returning to Canada, FitzGerald started making small drypoints and the occasional engraving, at the same time embarking on a tradition of making his own original prints for Christmas cards, mostly linocuts. Of his known lifetime production, by far the largest proportion are the sixty-four drypoints and twenty-eight linocuts; other media, such as engravings, monoprints, lithographs, and stencils, engaged his attention only briefly. It is surprising that interest in making multiple original prints had not been sparked until 1922 when the artist was in a school situation away from home. Even though serious printmaking had not the place in Canada that it has now, a small but active group of printmakers had been working in Winnipeg since the early part of the century. Some of these were employed in the art department of the T Eaton Company, the cpr, or Brigden’s, while others taught at the technical school. The best known of these were H.E. Bergman, of Brigden’s, with his meticulous wood engravings, and Walter J. Phillips, for a time art master at St. John’s Technical School, who produced both etchings and woodcuts.

For whatever reason, FitzGerald seems not to have been originally attracted to printmaking. In 1914 he had made a few monoprints, an experiment he never repeated, while during his nine years as a commercial artist (1912-21), he had, of course, arranged for many of...