Edna Jeanette Taçon thought of herself as Canadian and American, because she was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1905, grew up in Goderich, Ontario, and became active in the Canadian art scene (specifically Toronto’s) in the 1940s but lived most of her life in New York, where she died in 1980. She lost her father, Richard MacDougall, a talented violinist, at the age of six, and was given up by her mother, Mathilda Marshall. Jane MacFarlane, a Scottish-born Presbyterian widow from Goderich, adopted her, and in 1924 they moved to Toronto so that Edna could further her study of music, especially the violin. Five years later, after a long engagement, she married the English-born painter Percy Henry Taçon, who taught at Central Collegiate Institute in Hamilton, where the couple settled.
Edna’s music mentors included Géza de Kresz, Sir Ernest MacMillan, and Nathan Milstein, and she was good enough to play concerts across Ontario and in New York. Possessed of a strong...
Keith Garebian has published thirty books and five chapbooks, including the poetry collections Three-Way Renegade and, most recently, Stay. He is featured in the third volume of Laurence Hutchman’s In the Writers’ Words.
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