Goodridge Roberts’s Spring Flowers (c. 1958) is a vibrant still life in oil on masonite, signed bottom right, that radiates colour and painterly energy. 

Goodridge Roberts (1904–1974) was a distinguished Canadian painter known for his landscapes, figure paintings, still lifes, and interiors. Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, to a family of Canadian writers, he grew up expressing a keen awareness of light, colour, and environment. Roberts began his formal training at the École des Beaux‑Arts de Montréal and continued at the Art Students League of New York, where mentors such as John Sloan and Boardman Robinson introduced him to French Modernists and the Italian primitive tradition.

Over his long career, Roberts played a significant role in Canadian art both as an artist and a teacher. He settled in Ottawa in 1930, taught and exhibited widely, and later helped establish the Roberts‑Neumann School of Art in Montreal. He was a founding member of the Eastern Group of Painters and the Contemporary Arts Society, and he taught at the Art Association of Montreal before serving as an official war artist in England during World War II. Roberts’s work was selected for Canada’s first official participation in the Venice Biennale in 1952, and in 1959 he became the first artist‑in‑residence at the University of New Brunswick. His contributions were further recognized with membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Order of Canada, and in 1969 the National Gallery of Canada mounted a retrospective, a rare honour for a living artist.