Roloff Beny was 13 years old when he sold his first painting and 15 when he won a four-week scholarship to the Banff Summer School of Fine Arts. He wasn’t known as Roloff then but as “Wilfred,” the second son of Charles Beny, a car dealer in Medicine Hat, Alberta. At Banff he met other art students and discovered, “I was not necessarily an oddity for wanting to devote my life to painting.”

His mother encouraged him and his father was supportive as long as he got good grades and worked hard. Wilfred did both. After high school, he went to Trinity College in Toronto, taking Fine Arts and Classical Studies, and, while there, had a one-man show at Hart House. A local daily paper described the show as “interesting and full of promise.”

Graduating with honours, Beny went, on a scholarship, to Iowa State where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree. While there, he also made a series of prints based on Ecclesiastes. Deciding that “Wilfred” was a name more suitable for a pet rabbit than for an artist, he adopted his mother’s maiden name, “Roloff.”
 

When only 30 years old, Roloff Beny was already estrablished as one of Canada's best-known modern painters, having had 25 one-man shows and many joint exhibitions with artists such as Jack Shadbolt Bertram Brooker. By the time he recieved the Order of Canada in 1967, Beny had already achieved international recognition as a photographer. His photographic career completely came to overshadow his earlier work as an artist. Sir Herbert Read, the famous British critic of the mid-20th century, exclaimed in the Observer in 1958 that Beny's photographs are the images of a painter and "...though they owe their precision to the prodigious skill of the photographer, it is the painter that sees and the poet that relates." [Photo, courtesy The University of Alberta Art Gallery]

Fellowships took him next to Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University where, at one group exhibit, critics, New York papers, and the Art News singled out his work. He also sold some prints of his Ecclesiastes to Harvard, Yale, the Library of Congress, and a complete set of his lithographs won first prize at the Brooklyn Museum.

In 1948 he was invited to Greece by his Trinity College mentor, Dr. Homer Thompson, head of the American school of Classical Studies in Athens, who appreciated Roloff’s back-ground in classical studies and talent as an artist. Roloff loved Greece but, before the year ended, he was in Venice where he sought out Peggy Guggenheim, a famous American collector of contemporary art.

Beny was particularly adept at meeting and charming rich and famous people, and Peggy became a supporter and friend. She arranged a one-man show for him that attracted many well-known people. Roloff admitted in his diary, “People of power, position and accomplishment intrigue me because I admire them and because they inspire me to do better.”

A bout with rheumatic fever in 1950 brought Roloff home to Lethbridge where his parents had resettled, and he began work on Aegean Notebook, the first of his 16 books. Mayfair magazine wrote about the book and it sold out.

His health restored, Beny moved to Toronto where John and Signy Eaton arranged a one-man show of his work. He soon moved on to Paris and held a one-man show at the Palais Royale. Other shows were scheduled for Milan and London, prompting Reuter’s News agency to report, “The Alberta boy is a minor rage in European art circles.”

Another fellowship took him back to New York where, to bolster his income, Roloff also did fashion photography. He had first become serious about photography in 1951 when he and an ex-roommate at Trinity had travelled through Europe, and Roloff had taken photographs if he couldn’t stay to sketch a scene or building. Gradually Roloff had found he was taking more than “mere snapshots for future reference. I still saw them as an adjunct to my painting but began to ... compose my photographs as I did my drawings.”
 

Dust Jacket for To Everything There is a Season: Roloff Beny in Canada. Published to commemorate Canada's centennial, this lavish publication was produced by Thames and Hudson Limited for Longmans Canada in 1967. The 56 colour plates, 144 photo-gravure plates and 10 maps and line drawings are interwoven by commentary from famous historical figures and contemporary Canadians. Other countries such as Japan, India, Italy, Iran, and Iceland were lavishly photographed by Beny and celebrated in coffee table books making Beny famous as a globtrotting photographer with a painter's eye.

In January 1956, he held his first photographic exhibition in London. He also met the founder of Thames and London Publishing Company and suggested a photographic volume “... on the art and architecture of the Mediterranean world with essays by famous authors on their favourite parts of that world.” He suggested such people as Jean Cocteau, Sir Herbert Read, and Bernard Berenson whom he had met earlier and photographed, recording in his diary, “After all, I had no reputation as a photographer and if the book was to sell, I needed those names because my ambitions for the book were enormous, megalomaniac and sumptuous.”

Two years later The Thrones of Earth and Heaven was lavishly launched at London, New York, and Rome. Beny planned the launchings with an eye to publicity and promotion, suggesting, in London for example, that guests dress in red, black, and white to reflect the colour scheme of the book jacket. He even served colour-coordinated refreshments. The crowds came and Thrones became an artistic success, winning the International Prize for Design at the Leipzig Book Fair and numerous other commendations.

From then on, Beny concentrated on photography, seldom mentioning his former artistic career. By the time Thrones was published, he had settled in Rome where he made friends with the famous and near famous, dressed eccentrically, threw extravagant parties, and worked hard photographing for a number of leading journals and magazines. Growing bored, he proposed a book based on the ancient civilization of Greece, A Time of Gods.

Next, he was sponsored for a round-the-world trip to make a photographic interpretation of the travel book, Pleasure of Ruins, the first book to introduce his colour work. This was followed by his book on Canada, To Everything There Is a Season, which appeared in time for the nation’s centennial in 1967. At its launch in Toronto, he met Jack McClelland, who later became his publisher for several volumes and his friend. Japan in Colour was also published in 1967 and he donated some of his early art works to the University of Lethbridge.

McClelland published India in 1969 and a book on Ceylon in 1971. On its completion he was asked by the president of Italy, “When are you going to do my country?” In 1974, In Italy appeared, the launch being spread over eight days.

Beny then got the Shah and Shahbanou of Iran to commission him for two books on their country. He became a close friend of theirs over the next four years, but as biographer Mitchell Crites, who travelled with him throughout Iran, recalled in his 1994 book, Visual Journeys, the friendship made him enemies everywhere because “imperial patronage made him arrogant and demanding.”

After completion of the second volume in 1978, further books on Iran were being considered by Beny and McClelland but only months later, the Shah was forced into exile. Beny met Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to seek support for a book on that country but the project was stymied by government officials. The Alberta government also backed away from a proposal to secure his archives when opposition was voiced by the press, public, and even the art community who “resented Roloff’s flamboyant expatriate status.” Alberta bought only his Canadian work.

In 1980, an exhibition featuring photographs from his Canadian book was shown in Rome and in 1981, the two books, Churches of Rome and Odyssey, Mirror of the Mediterranean, were published. In 1982, a solution was found to have his archives sent to the University of Lethbridge while he drove himself that year and the next to complete five separate projects: revisiting Greece for The Gods of Greece, doing photography for Rajasthan: Land of Kings, pho-tographing Iceland, and working on the architectural and people volumes of his own Visual Journeys project. “I’m a workaholic,” he noted in his diary. “Until they cart me away, I’ll still turn out books.” Another entry reflected his attitude towards work. “My books are my life-lines the ladder from the well of my loneliness.”

When he made these entries he had no reason to believe that he soon would be “carted away.” Shortly before any of these projects were published, Roloff died of a cerebral hemorrhage in the bath of his Rome apartment on March 16, 1984. His ashes were buried, along with copies of his published books, beside his mother in the family plot at Medicine Hat.

 Mel James