In July 1969, after months of feeling unwell, Jack Chambers was diagnosed with acute myeloblastic leukemia, a terminal illness that kills its victims in approximately three months if untreated. Unsure of how much time he had left, the painter from London, Ontario, turned his attention to the practical matter of providing for his family. He informed his dealer Nancy Poole that unlike other artist representatives she would no longer determine the price of his work based on current market values. He, Jack Chambers, would now decide what his paintings were worth, and, says Poole, “it was my job to find a buyer.”

Still, she was stunned the following spring when Chambers demanded $25,000 for Sunday Morning No. 2, a picture of his pyjama-clad three- and four-year-old sons watching television in the family living room. “To put that amount in perspective,” says Poole, “it was five times” what had been paid for his last major painting, 401 Towards London No. 1, just a year earlier. She was skeptical about making the sale, but in June 1970 Eric A. Schwendau, a local financial consultant, bought the piece for its asking price, and overnight Jack Chambers became “Canada’s highest-earning artist.” He told the press, “Now I think I’m getting about what my work is worth. But until recently, I thought I was underrated and underpaid.”

The sale of Sunday Morning No. 2 caused controversy. Greg Curnoe, the well-known London painter, was so angry he stopped speaking to Poole, believing she had undermined the Canadian art market. “Of course, he stayed friends with Jack,” says Poole. “Jack said, ‘I’m a dying man. He can’t get mad at me.’” But for Chambers, the discord couldn’t have come at a better time. In September 1970, the Vancouver Art Gallery opened a retrospective exhibition of his paintings, which, coming just months after the fracas surrounding the sale of Sunday Morning No. 2, put him front and centre in the Canadian art world.

Reviews of the exhibit unanimously asserted that at age thirty-nine the country’s best-paid artist had hit his stride. Chambers had painted Sunday Morning No. 2 in a style he called perceptual realism, which he adopted in 1968, reinvigorating his reputation as an artist. Before perceptual realism, wrote Geoffrey James in Time, Chambers was “not smiled upon by the Canadian art establishment.” Many of the cognoscenti had dismissed him as a copyist, but as Alan Walker observed in Canadian magazine, he was praised now for “his poetic sensibility and his subtle colouring.” Along with Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Greg Curnoe, and Tony Urquhart, Jack Chambers had arrived as one of the most notable artists of his generation.

More than a hundred paintings were exhibited at the 1970 retrospective, but the buzz surrounded one that remained curiously unfinished. Called Sunday Noon (and later renamed Lunch), it was a portrait of the artist sitting down to a winter’s midday meal with his wife and two young sons. It was included in the show because, as Chambers wrote in a piece for Artscanada magazine (where he previewed the work-in-progress), it embodied perceptual realism. Viewers noticed that although the faces of the Chambers family were just taking form, a phenomenal composition was emerging from the canvas. When the retrospective moved from the VAG to the Art Gallery of Ontario, the reviews were equally enthusiastic. Not only was Chambers breaking art market records, they gushed, but judging from the exhibition’s unfinished work, Lunch, he was about to do it again.

Only he didn’t. Although he defied the odds and lived for another nine years, adopting a macrobiotic diet, travelling to India for spiritual treatments, and — despite periods of extreme fatigue — creating more than thirty major works, he never completed Lunch. It was the one significant piece left unfinished when he died. And now, forty-one years after it was first exhibited, it’s in the spotlight once again as the AGO opens a new retrospective called Jack Chambers: Light, Spirit, Time, Place, and Life. As the exhibition’s curator, University of Toronto professor Dennis Reid, explains, “All of the show’s themes are in that painting.” But while it was once regarded as a work of hope and possibility, it’s now a mystery. Why didn’t Chambers finish his masterpiece?

Born in London at Victoria Hospital, on March 25, 1931, Jack Chambers grew up in a modest Baptist home, the son of a welder. Throughout his childhood and teenage years, he took little interest in school, which he described as time spent “waiting between recesses and the summer holidays.” But that is where his art education began, well and early. At Sir Adam Beck Collegiate Institute, he was taught by the author, illustrator, artist, and art therapist Selwyn Dewdney (he and his wife, Irene, became the boy’s second parents after his mother died). At H. B. Beal Technical School, he studied with the London sculptor, painter, and muralist Herb Ariss, who advocated figurative drawing as the cornerstone of art. And by the time he reached eighteen, he had won the Young Artist prize at the Western Ontario Annual Exhibit, for his still life Lillies.

In 1953, he quit the University of Western Ontario after only a year, but not before establishing what would become a lifelong friendship with Ross Woodman, a scholar of the poet Shelley and an art collector. Searching for a way to become a serious painter, Chambers decided to leave Canada for Europe. He wandered around Italy, Austria, and the south of France, where — famously — he demonstrated his extreme self-confidence by scaling the walls of Pablo Picasso’s home to meet the master and seek his artistic advice. Remarkably, Picasso gave him an audience and recommended that he study in Spain. And so that’s what he did, spending the next five years in Madrid, immersed in classical arts at the Escuela Central de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.

The young Canadian fully embraced Spain. He learned the language, fell in love with a sophisticated Argentine beauty, Olga Sanchez Bustos, and converted to Roman Catholicism. For Chambers, the moral rules of the Catholic Church provided a tangible spiritualism he could work at, as he explained, “the same way that the academy provided standards to direct my anxieties into specific problems to be solved.” Spain also introduced him to the baroque masters Juan Sánchez Cotán and Francisco de Zurbarán, whose works became a continuing inspiration and influenced his development of perceptual realism.

Lunch looks a lot like photorealism, a style of painting popularized in the late 1960s by a group of American artists, including Chuck Close and Richard Estes. But according to Chambers, perceptual realism had nothing to do with what was happening south of the border. The painting’s genealogy (like that of 401 Towards London No. 1 and Sunday Morning No. 2 before it) stretches back to seventeenth-century Spain and a spiritually charged style that 300 years later would stop Chambers in his tracks.