Freda Pemberton Smith

Photo by Mari Hill Harpur

Artist Freda Pemberton Smith was born in Montreal in 1902. She was a well-known landscapist and portraitist whose career spanned eight decades of the 20th Century. She painted and exhibited across Canada, from Newfoundland to British Columbia. In the mid-sixties she moved to Vankleek Hill, Ontario, where she lived until her death in 1991. She is remembered in the Home Avenue mural.

Her biography appears in Colin MacDonalds A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Concordia University’s Canadian Women Artists History Initiative and online in Wikipedia. She is the subject of a book, Freda Pemberton. Her work and a video, Painting is a River (Rogers Hawkesbury). She is represented in private, public and corporate collections at home and abroad. Most recently, one of her paintings was included in the grand re-opening of the Ottawa Art Gallery.

Freda was a member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, and is represented by her artistic executor, Harriet Pemberton Smith.