Walter Klinkhoff, doyen of Montreal’s commercial art galleries, tells the story of a phone call from business tycoon E.P. Taylor: 'Can you remove the office portraits of my predecessors and replace them with good Canadian paintings? Nothing too expensive. I know horses and nothing about art, and you know everything...

Like many of his contemporaries, Canadian painter Frederick Simpson Coburn (1871-1960) listened to the beat of the drum inside him, so his oeuvre reflects little, if anything, of the art movements that revolutionized 20th-century and late 19th-century art. Coburn, the subject of a retrospective at Galerie Walter Klinkhoff (1200 Sherbrooke...