This coloured drawing depicts actor and director Robertson Davies as the Tailor in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, produced by the Peterborough Little Theater in Peterborough, Ontario. Davies was a prominent Canadian author, actor and playwright. He was educated in Britain and was trained in acting, directing and stage management at the Old Vid Repertory Company. This particular production, directed by Davies, won the Louis Jouvet Trophy for best Direction at the Dominion Drama Festival in Toronto, as well as second place in the Eastern Ontario Drama Festival in Brockville.

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 porayed 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.