{"product_id":"alan-caswell-collier-relief-stiff-1","title":"Alan Caswell Collier, Relief Stiff","description":"\u003cp\u003eAlan Caswell Collier was one of Canada’s most successful landscape painters, but during the Depression he joined the thousands of single, unemployed men who rode the rails or hitchhiked across North America in search of jobs.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe eventually made his way to British Columbia’s remote government-run relief camps, the birthplace of the famous Communist-led On-to-Ottawa Trek. Labouring for twenty cents a day, he detailed camp life and politics in letters to his fiancée and depicted his fellow “relief stiffs” and the BC landscape in character sketches and paintings.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIncisive and candid, his letters reveal a born contrarian with a strong sense of social superiority over his fellow “twenty centers.” Collier resisted the mobilization that led to the Trek, but in the 1940s he became a union activist and an ardent social democrat.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIllustrated with well-known paintings and never-before-published sketches, portraits, and landscapes, \u003cem\u003eAlan Caswell Collier, Relief Stiff\u003c\/em\u003e offers a fresh perspective on an eminent Ontario artist and on the politics, hopes, and dreams of a generation who came of age at a time of economic upheaval and class conflict. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Edited by Peter Neary","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43573189509302,"sku":"9780774835008","price":35.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0251\/4980\/0541\/files\/9780774835008_13cb43bb-a070-4b23-9cbf-4afab8bb00e2.jpg?v=1727877002","url":"https:\/\/combined-academic.myshopify.com\/products\/alan-caswell-collier-relief-stiff-1","provider":"Combined Academic Publishers - Mare Nostrum Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}