Abstract

This thesis investigates and analyses the early mural work (1946-1954) by the New Brunswick artist Frederick Joseph Ross (b. 1927). Fred Ross studied art at the Saint John Vocational School during the early 1940s, where he was introduced by his teacher Ted Campbell to Renaissance art as well as the work and ideals of the post-revolutionary Mexican muralists and the New Deal-sponsored American W.P.A. artists. Influenced by their social content and compositional strategies, Ross produced five figurative murals over the ensuing years: Annual School Picnic (1946), City Slums (1950), and Humanistic Education (1954), all of which were installed at the Saint John Vocational School; The Destruction of War and Rebuilding the World Through Education (1948), a two-panel mural installed at Fredericton High School; and a mural at the Hotel de la Borda in Taxco, Mexico (1949). Of the six, only City Slums, Humanistic Education , and the Hotel de la Borda Mural are still extant and in situ. Prominent realist and social artistic convictions emerged in Saint John during the pre- and post-World War II periods. Painters like Miller Brittain and Jack Humphrey, among others, shared a similarly sympathetic outlook that portrayed the desperation, angst, and joys of the working class. Such models, combined with Ross's own murals, position the rise of muralism in Saint John during the 1940s, its ebb by the late 1950s, and its subsequent reevaluation and rebirth in public interest during the 1990s