Lucius Richard O’Brien was an important nineteenth century Canadian painter who was an instrumental figure in establishing many of the major artistic and cultural intuitions in Canada. Born in Shanty Bay, Ontario, O’Brien first began to study art under John G. Howard at Upper Canada College in Toronto.

O’Brien spent most of his time painting in Ontario, Quebec and on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, in both oil and watercolour. By 1873, O’Brien was very active in the Toronto art world - in 1874 he became the vice-president of the Ontario Society of Artists, and he retained this position until 1880 when he helped organize the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, serving as its first president. The Academy was instrumental in creating a national art gallery, which became the National Gallery of Canada. In the Gallery’s first exhibition one of O’Brien’s works, Sunrise on the Saguenay, Cape Trinity was the star of the show, and it remains an important piece in National Gallery’s permanent collection. In 1880, he began to work on the publication Picturesque Canada, which he edited, and toured across Canada, commissioning artists to produced woodblock prints to illustrate the text. In 1886, O’Brien was one of the first artists to travel west on the newly completed Canadian Pacific Railway, and paint the Rockies and the Pacific Coast.

His landscapes are known for their realism and their fine sense of light, akin to American Luminists such as Albert Bierstadt, as well as European Romantics. Although influenced by international artistic movements, O’Brien’s work most definitely expressed a sense of Canadian nationalism.