permanent residence until his death. Watson painted the rural Grand River countryside for most of his artistic life. He was noted for his commitment to Canadian landscapes: he said at a lecture on "The Methods of Some Great Landscape Painters" at the University of Toronto in 1900: "there is at the bottom of each artistic conscience a love for the land of their birth... no immortal work has been done which has not as one of its promptings for its creation a feeling its creator had of having roots in his native land and being a product of its soil". The artists with whom Watson was most often associated were the English landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837) and such French Barbizon artists as Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878), Narcisse Díaz de la Peña (1807–1876), Constant Troyon (1810–1865), Jules Dupré (1811–1889), and tangentially Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) because Watson didn`t share Millet`s focus on the nobility of human figures. The thematic, formal, and psychological similarities between Watson, John Constable, and the Barbizon artists were strong. They were emotionally and psychologically devoted to landscapes with whose topography and inhabitants they were intimately familiar. In 1882, while touring Canada, Oscar Wilde first noted the similarity between Watson and Constable, dubbing him the "Canadian Constable" due to the similarity between Watson's work and of the great English landscape painter. Wilde and Watson may have met at public events. There may have been letters between the two men which could be in a private collection or lost. Watson moved to England in 1887 for three years (1887–1890), and further established his reputation. Over the next few years, his works became increasingly popular among collectors and received prizes at expositions across North America. In 1902, at the height of his British career, he exhibited The Flood Gate. In 1904, he won a bronze medal at the Canadian exhibition at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. He campaigned to save the Waterloo County woodlands that he had preserved in his landscapes. Due to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 in which he lost his savings, he was forced to hand over many works from his personal collection to the local savings & loans firm, which held them for security and then tried to sell the paintings itself. Homer Watson died in Doon on May 30, 1936. Legacy Many of Watson's works are still on display