About: Frederick William Lock

Frederick William Lock (active 1841–1863) is known primarily as a Canadian painter of portraits and landscapes. His medium was predominately pastel chalk crayon on paper. Many of Lock's pastel portraits were executed on "dark paper" so that the subject's faces often came out relatively dark-skinned, an unusual technique. A few of his landscapes were lithographed, notably of Niagara Falls and of The Thousand Islands, while others were in pencil, ink and in watercolor. Citations of Lock and his artwork are found in Early Printers and Engravers in Canada by J. Russel Harper, and in The Collector's Dictionary of Canadian Artists at Auction by Anthony R. Westbridge and Diana L. Bodnar.