Grant Macdonald was a prolific artist and consummate draughtsman. After a decade of studies at the Ontario College of Art, (Toronto), the Art Students League (New York), and then Heatherley’s Art School (London), he was primed with the skill, and already had the personality, to take on the celebrity world. With pencil, pen, ink and watercolour, Macdonald portrayed the players of the London theatre scene, on Broadway, and at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival–including Tallulah Bankhead, Noël Coward, John Gielgud, Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, Kate Reid, and William Shatner. During WWII, he also depicted homefront workers and servicemen, as a commissioned artist with the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve. His work appeared in newspapers, magazines and books, as well as exhibitions across the country in the 1940s through the 1960s.

In the midst of his success, in 1947, Macdonald moved to Kingston to care for his ailing father. There he became a popular society portraitist, producing numerous paintings and drawings of prominent Kingstonians. Children were a favourite subject. This drawing of Ted, Geoff and Anne Hodgetts was commissioned by Queen’s University’s Department of Political Science and presented to renowned political scientist John Edwin Hodgetts and his wife Ruth in 1965. Dr. Hodgetts was head of the department and taught at Queen’s for twenty years before returning to his alma mater, the University of Toronto. With characteristic facility and elongated form, Macdonald captures the siblings in a relaxed but classic triangular configuration, Anne gazing out at us with particular intensity.