Joseph (Joe) Francis Plaskett is best known for his figurative work, particularly of the interior of his Paris apartment. Plaskett was born in New Westminster, British Columbia. He attained an Honours B.A. in History at the University of British Columbia and then took a year of teacher training. For five years, he worked as a teacher. During this time, he took formal art instruction in the evenings at the Vancouver School of Art, and he received encouragement from G.G. Sedgewick, Lawren Harris and Jock MacDonald. In 1945, Plaskett spent a summer painting with A.Y. Jackson at the Banff Summer School. That same year Plaskett joined the B.C. Society of Artists, and in 1946 he was awarded the first Emily Carr Scholarship, which enabled him to study art at the California School of Fine Art. His work at this time consisted of landscapes of the Okanagan Valley and the Cariboo District of British Columbia, as well as imaginative figurative paintings and abstractions.

From 1947 to 1949, he assumed the principalship at the Winnipeg School of Art. In 1947, and during a summer in 1948, he continued his studies in New York under well-known abstractionist and critic Hans Hofmann. In 1949, Plaskett resigned from the Winnipeg School and sailed to Paris to paint full time, where he was drawn away from abstraction. He also spent time in London, studying at the Slade School of Art in 1951. In 1957, he settled in Paris, where he acquired two floors of a fifteenth century apartment building in the Marais district, which he decorated with Louis 16th style furniture and objects that he found in local flea markets. He created many views in pastel and oil of his apartment’s interiors, including still lifes, as well as portraits of the scholars, artists, writers and aristocrats who visited him there. Plaskett’s intimate and romantic vision of his life in Paris through the microcosm of his apartment was fascinating.

tario and Winnipeg Art Gallery, as well as others. He received the Order of Canada in 2001.