Family and Rainstorm (1955)
Alex Colville
David Alexander Colville, PC, CC, ONS (born August 24, 1920 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian painter. Colville’s family moved from Toronto to Amherst, Nova Scotia in 1929. He attended Mount Allison University from 1938–1942, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Colville married Rhoda Wright that year and enlisted in the Canadian Army under the War Artist Program. During his four-year deployment to the European Theatre, he worked as one of Canada’s most famous war artists, famously painting troops landing at Juno Beach on D-Day. Colville returned to New Brunswick after the war and became a faculty member with the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University where he taught from 1946 - 1963. Colville left teaching to devote himself to painting and print-making full-time from a studio in his home on York Street; this building is now named Colville House. In 1973, he moved his family to his wife’s hometown of Wolfville, Nova Scotia where they lived in the house that her father had built and in which she was born. The Colvilles have three sons and a daughter along with eight grandchildren.