Early years Challener was born in
Whetstone,
Middlesex, England. while working for the Toronto Lithographing Company. Challener was a teenager when studying with Reid, but the two went on to become lifelong friends and colleagues. After five years there, he became a newspaper artist and worked as a full-time artist thereafter.
Career Challener's first commission for a mural painting was for two ceiling panels for McConkey's restaurant in 1895, his second for the proscenium arch in the Russell Theatre, Ottawa (1897) for which he won a competition with his
The Arts Paying Homage to the Drama For the
Parkwood Estate, the family home of Colonel Robert
Samuel McLaughlin, from 1924 to 1926, he painted three large murals for the Grand Hall of the residence as well as 14 paintings for McLaughlin's billiard room which showed the Colonel's life, his family and friends. In painting murals, Challener was part of a chapter in Canadian Art called
Decorative Painting based on
William Morris's
Arts and Crafts movement. In Canada, the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada was founded by
George Agnew Reid and others in 1903. It became the Canadian Society of Applied Art in 1905, and combined with a
City Beautiful movement to encourage murals in civic and commercial establishments. In Toronto, the Society of Mural Decorators was founded in 1897 by Reid, Challener,
William Cruikshank and
Edmund Wyly Grier. Many artists, both before and after the society was formed, executed murals, only Challener was one of the few who made a career of it. "He has produced some very clever and important decorations", wrote E. F. B. Johnston in 1914. (Johnston used "clever" in a positive sense. On the same page of text, he praised Challener as having "perhaps the keenest sense of light and brilliancy of colour of any of the Canadian painters"). In 1900, he showed
A Singing Lesson (1900) at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (it was also shown in the
Art Association of Montreal and in the Rochester Art Club Annual Exhibition in 1902). The model for the man in the mirror was Challener's close friend of his early years,
Walter Allward, playing his cello.
A Singing Lesson was singled out for praise. In reviews published in 1900, the
Ottawa Citizen wrote that the picture, "showing a young lady, clad in a yellow gown, standing before a piano, expressed, gracefully, an abundance of sentiment", while the
Ottawa Evening Journal wrote that the painting was "fresh, daring, and finished" and called Challener "one of Canada’s most promising and original artists." At the
Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo he was awarded a bronze medal and in 1904, he received a bronze medal at the
Canadian exhibition at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, informally known as the St. Louis World's Fair, at St. Louis, Missouri. He received the bronze medal at the Pan American Exhibition for his painting
The Workers of the Fields which he deposited in the Royal Canadian Academy diploma collection in the
National Gallery of Canada. During
WWI, Challener worked as a painter for the Canadian War Memorials Department. From 1921 to 1924, he taught at
Central Technical School, Toronto, and from 1927 to 1952, he taught at the
Ontario School of Art. Challener died in Toronto on September 30, 1959, at the age of 90. == Selected public collections ==