Doris Huestis Speirs

Doris Louise Huestis Speirs (née, Huestis; also known as Doris Huestis Mills; 7 October 1894 – 24 October 1989) was a Canadian ornithologist, artist and poet. The "Doris Huestis Speirs Award" is an annual prize bestowed by the Society of Canadian Ornithologists to "an individual who has made outstanding lifetime contributions in Canadian ornithology". A member of the Art Students’ League of Toronto and an art patron, she was the first Canadian to buy a Georgia O'Keeffe painting.

Born in Toronto, Ontario in 1894, Speirs was the daughter of Archibald Morrison and Florence Gooderham (Hamilton) Huestis. She attended Toronto Model School (1900–02) and Havergal College (1902–14). At the age of 17, she traveled through Europe with her music teacher, visiting art galleries and collecting sepia prints.

Encouraged by J. E. H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris, and A.Y. Jackson, Speirs was a self-taught painter. An amateur who was among the earliest Canadian painters to experiment in an abstract mode, she exhibited with the Group of Seven (1926, 1928, 1930, 1931) and the Canadian Group of Painters. Speirs belonged to a small group of freelance painters, mostly untrained, who received encouragement from the Group. She influenced two of her friends, Bess Larkin Housser (later Harris' wife) and Marjorie Meredith, and a sister, Marion Miller, to paint as well, each reaching a certain degree of success with their art.

In the 1920s, Speirs began to purchase art work. As early as 1924, she visited New York City art galleries, where she met the artists Rockwell Kent, Georgia O'Keeffe, and John Marin, the gallery owner, Alfred Stieglitz (O'Keeffe's husband), as well as the art critics, Walter Pach and C. Lewis Hind. In 1925, she purchased one of O'Keeffe's paintings from the Stieglitz gallery, the first Canadian to buy an O'Keeffe painting. It was willed to the Art Gallery of Ontario upon Speirs' death. Speirs also pioneered a rental system for artwork, approaching the artists of the Group of Seven to participate. After writing to the Christian Science Monitor, describing what she was doing, the rental system generated interest among readers.

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