Originally from Latvia, Janis Ferdinands Tidemanis led the life of a cosmopolitan artist. At the age of eleven he emigrated to live with an uncle in Cleveland, Ohio. After his first artistic attempts, he continued his studies in Italy and France. From 1930 he took part in exhibitions in Anvers, Brussels, Riga, Kaunas and Tallinn.

He stayed in Latvia until the outbreak of World War II. The German occupation in 1944 was followed by his capture and internment in Dachau, and later in Konstanz. In 1944 he managed to escape to Switzerland.

After the war ended, he moved to Toronto, where he lived until his death. For biographical reasons, Tidemanis' painterly oeuvre, inspired by Expressionism and Fauvism, is now widely scattered. I...