Jacques Godefroy de Tonnancour was a painter, writer, photographer and entomologist born in Montreal in 1917. He attended the École des beaux-arts, Montreal from 1937 to 1940. In 1942, his first solo exhibition took place at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal, and a painting from that same year, Young Woman Seated, was acquired by the National Gallery in Ottawa. A Canada Council Grant in 1945 enabled him to spend 16 months in Brazil, where he painted from nature and produced 47 works for an exhibition in Rio de Janeiro. Upon his return to Canada, de Tonnancour painted still life and figurative works influenced by Picasso and Matisse. He was a member of the Contemporary Art Society of Montreal, and drafted the manifesto for Prisme d'yeux, a group organized by Alfred Pellan that rejected the views of the Automatists. He stopped painting between 1950 and 1955 (with the exception of a dozen canvases), after which travels in the Laurentians, northern Ontario and Vancouver revived his interest in painting Canadian landscapes. His "squeegee" technique began in 1959 and led to experiments in abstraction, collage and mixed media until the early 1980s.

De Tonnancour taught at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal from 1969 to 1982. He completed several public art commissions in Quebec, while also participating in numerous international group exhibitions. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1979 and received the Order of Quebec in 1993. In 1982 he abandoned painting completely to collect and photograph insects - entomology had been a life-long interest. His works can be found in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Musée du Québec, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, New Brunswick, among others. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, the Canadian Group of Painters and the Contemporary Arts Society. De Tonnancour died in Montreal in 2005.