Edward Seago

Edward Seago amassed a devout following in Canada that began in Toronto with his first exhibition held at one of the foremost Canadian galleries, Laing Galleries at 194 Bloor Street West, in 1951. So noteworthy was his introduction to Canadian collectors that Earl Alexander, the Governor General of Canada, opened the exhibition. Collectors would queue to attend Seago’s sell-out exhibitions that would be hosted by Laing Galleries until the 1970s.
One of these works includes a quintessential sailing scene situated at Pin Mill on the banks of the Orwell River, featured in our Fall 2024 Fine Art auction.

“The delight Seago took in watching sailing vessels was perhaps a heritage of his seafaring ancestry. In addition to the brown-sailed barges taking flour ground in local mills to the open sea, the lighters heavily laden like floating stacks, with a long sail rigged on top as they crossed Heigham Sound, the old steam ferry at Walberswick, the sailing smacks at Lowestoft and the herring drifters at Yarmouth, there came, with the passage of time, modern, fully mechanized craft: snub-nosed tugs, cabin cruisers and motor yachts like his own Endeavour and Capricorn. But above all, there were Thames barges: from his childhood days, when he had watched them at Beccles, until the later decades of his life, when he painted them on the Thames, in the Harwich Approaches and especially on the river Orwell at Pin Mill.

Pin Mill became, from the 1950s on, what Argenteuil had been for Claude Monet in the early 1870s.”[1]

[1] James W. Reid and Edward Seago. 1991. Edward Seago: The Landscape Art. Philip Wilson Publishers, Limited, 104.