William Ronald Smith, known professionally as William Ronald, was an important Canadian painter, best known as the founder of the influential Canadian abstract art group Painters Eleven in 1953 and for his abstract expressionist "central image" paintings.
14 Facts About William Ronald
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William Ronald was the older brother of painter John Meredith.
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William Ronald was born in Stratford, Ontario, but he and his family moved to Fergus, Ontario where his father worked as a market gardener.
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William Ronald attended the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, graduating in 1951.
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William Ronald worked as a display designer for the Robert Simpson Co.
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William Ronald thereby discovered a way to get the public to accept non-representational art.
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William Ronald joined the stable of artists at Manhattan's Kootz Gallery, where he was put on retainer.
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William Ronald was accepted by critics, collectors, and artists such as Franz Kline, and enjoyed a multi-year period of success.
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William Ronald was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1975.
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William Ronald continued to paint through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, moving to Montreal, Quebec, and then to Barrie, Ontario where he maintained a studio.
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William Ronald gained some notoriety for his portrait series of Canadian prime ministers, a pioneering highly abstracted portrayal of heads of government opened by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Toronto in 1984 at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
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Never a stranger to criticism or polemics, William Ronald loved to paint in public, frequently hiring strippers and showgirls to dance around him as he painted.
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William Ronald continued to paint until his death in 1998 and in fact suffered a heart attack while painting Untitled.
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The Estate of William Ronald was offered online in a Cowley Abbott Auction in 2023.