This catalogue details the entire collection of paintings, sculpture, prints and drawings in The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (755 works by 218 different artists ), up to the end of December 1977.The collection policy of The Robert McLaughlin Gallery was set in 1970: the acquistion of works by the members of the Painters Eleven (1953-1960), the group which introduced abstraction to the Ontario art scene in a significant way. By 1974, the policy's scope had expanded to artists whose work paralleled Painters Eleven.The original core of the collection is the thirty-seven paintings willed to the city of Oshawa by Alexandra Luke (Margaret McLaughlin, 1901-1967) who was a member of the Painters Eleven. One year after her death, Luke's husband C. Ewart McLaughlin created the Art Gallery of Oshawa and donated it to the City.

Joan Murray, an independent curator and art historian, is considered one of the most accessible of Canadian art writers and has studied and exhibited Tom Thomson for four decades. Since the late 1960s, she has been a curator of several institutions, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, and director of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa (1974-99) and the McMichael Canadian Art Gallery in Kleinburg (2005-6). Murray was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy in 1992 and has been honoured with the Senior Award from the Association of Cultural Executives, the Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries and the Order of Ontario. She lives in Toronto, Ontario

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