Miller Gore Brittain

Miller Gore Brittain

Miller Gore Brittain, painter (b at Saint John, NB 12 Nov 1912; d there 21 Jan 1968). His early paintings, inspired by life in Saint John, were in the style promoted by the Art Students League, New York, which he attended 1930-32. Depicting labourers at work, local citizens on crowded streetcars or derelicts congregated outside drinking establishments, his paintings earned him the label "the Canadian Brueghel."

During WWII Brittain served in the RCAF and worked briefly as a WAR ARTIST. In 1946 he returned to Saint John, and the balance of his life he devoted to painting works with surrealistic overtones: figurative compositions of tortured bodies, pastel landscapes that pictured flowers, heads and bodies set in strange lunar landscapes, and portraits of frenzied religious subjects.