Robertson, Hugh Douglas

ROBERTSON, Hugh Douglas (1900-1996), active in Hamilton, Ont. as an architect and artist. At the young age of twenty-one, he was invited to form a partnership with Lester B. Husband in 1921, and collaborated with him until 1925 (see list of works under Husband & Roberston), and he later re-joined Husband in a new partnership of Husband, Robertson & Wallace from 1946 to 1953.
Born in Hamilton on 11 January 1900, he attended the School of Architecture at McGill University in Montreal and graduated in 1925. He then worked as a draftsman and architectural designer in Miami, Fla. (1925-26), in Montreal (1926), and in New York City (1926-28) before returning to Hamilton to pursue his career. Robertson was elected as an Associate member of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London in 1928, and was also active as an artist and an Associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy, where he regularly exhibited his paintings from 1931 to 1943. During WWII, in 1943, he was employed as an Assistant Architect in the Naval Services Branch in Ottawa, and while there, he exhibited some of his of his award-winning watercolour drawings at a commercial gallery on Sparks Street (Ottawa Journal, 5 May 1943, 25). Robertson also participated in the Spring Exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 1933 to 1943. He resigned from the Ontario Association of Architects in December 1970 (inf. Ontario Association of Architects; inf. E. McMann, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts: Exhibitions & Members 1880-1979, 350; E. McMann, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts - Spring Exhibitions, 1988, 325-26)