Gerald Squires has found inspiration for many of his landscapes, portraits, and symbolic narratives in the places and people of his native province. Born in Change Islands, Newfoundland, in 1937, he took his early art training in Toronto, where his family moved when he was 12. He returned here with his wife and daughters 20 years later, and settled in 1971 in the lighthouse-keeper's house in Ferryland.

Much of Squires's painting has an overtly spiritual quality. Early symbolic works such as The Wanderer, The Boatman, and Cassandra were followed by a major commission from Mary Queen of the World Parish in Mount Pearl: two triptychs and The Stations of the Cross. In subsequent years Squires has concentrated on landscape; the roots of this interest go back at least to the Ferryland Downs paintings of the late 1970s.

Among his many honours, Gerald Squires was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy and appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 1999, and received the Golden Jubilee Award from Her Majesty the Queen in 2003. A major retrospective of the artist's work was mounted by the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador in 1998, and Gerald Squires: Newfoundland Artist, by Des Walsh and Susan Jamieson, was published in 1995. Gerald Squires has lived in Holyrood since 1983.