Nobody knows where Jack Nichols's desire to make art came from, but the urge was powerful. "Some people have to make art and they find a way of doing it," says Dennis Reid, director of collections and research at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
He grew up in Montreal and Ottawa, quitting school when he was barely in his teens. "I was one of those kids hanging around the streets with a cigarette in my mouth," he said many decades later.
But, there was something about his unschooled talent that attracted the tutelage of artists, collectors and critics, including Louis Muhlstock, F.H. Varley, Douglas Duncan and Paul Duval. Like many aspects of the life and career of Mr. Nichols - our foremost Second World War naval artist - the details are opaque, the connections murky.
Unlike most war artists, he concentrated not on armaments, ships or planes, but on human experience, the fear of death, the sanctity of human life, the religiosity of sacrifice. Instead of panoramas, he focused on individuals - both combatants and refugees - and the intensity of their personal responses to the apocalyptic horror of modern warfare.
"At his best he was utterly brilliant," says Laura Brandon, art and war historian at the Canadian War Museum. She featured the 46 drawings and paintings he produced as a war artist in Memento Mori, a travelling exhibition mounted by the Museum in 1997-98.
"In terms of the navy they are the best things we have, because he wasn't trying to please the admirals by producing beautiful ships on blue water. He was trying to get inside the heads of the people having the experiences," she said, commenting on Drowning Sailor.
That painting depicts a dying sailor sinking into a maelstrom. "The only reason that he was able to paint that image of a German going down," said Prof. Brandon, "was because there was enough light reflecting off the surface of the oil on the water to make that image visible."
Lord Beaverbrook created Canada's first official war art program in 1916. Artists, including A.Y. Jackson and Mr. Varley, who would later belong to the expressionist landscape Group of Seven, showed the horrific underside of fighting for king and country.
Canada did not launch its official Second World War art program until 1943; only artists already serving in the Armed Forces were commissioned. Some of them, including, Alex Colville and Molly and Bruno Boback established flourishing artistic careers after the killing and the bombing stopped.
Mr. Nichols was different. Although he became a celebrated printmaker in the 1950s and 1960s, his reputation rests primarily on his war art.
Working as a figurative artist in an abstract and secular age partly accounts for his obscurity in the contemporary art canon, but equally significant is the nature of his personality.
Between 1941 and 1968, he had nearly 20 one-person shows and participated in many national and international group exhibitions.
But something went awry in the late 1960s. Mr. Nichols, who lived above his crammed studio in a former butcher shop on Sackville Street in Toronto, became reclusive and suspicious and had wrangles with art dealers and galleries.
"He had a poetry and pathos about his depiction of humanity that nobody else could touch," said York University art historian Anna Hudson, but "he couldn't deal with the marketplace."
Friends reported seeing him walk past them on the street, looking unkempt, carrying shopping bags, often with a wild look in his eye, his beard flowing down to his chest.
He appeared to be suffering from a mental illness and for long periods of time he stopped making art.
"Nobody has done the Jack Nichols show yet. The nature of his great talent is yet to be fully explored," says Mr. Reid of the AGO. "It will be very much about this man's own psychology, I suspect, because he was extremely sensitive in very particular ways and that touches his work all the way through."
Jack Nichols, the youngest of three sons in a Jewish family, originally named Nachlis, was born in Montreal in 1921. His father had probably emigrated from Europe - perhaps fleeing a pogrom in Russia - in the early part of the century.
