BEAVER HALL GROUP
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THE WOMEN OF BEAVER HALL: CANADIAN MODERNIST PAINTERS by Evelyn Walters
Nora Collyer Emily Coonan Prudence Heward Mabel Lockerby Henrietta Mabel May Kathleen Morris Lilias Torrance Newton Sarah Robertson Anne Savage Ethel Seath
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REVIEWS:
1. The Other Group of Seven: At a time when Tom Thomson was committing the jack pines of Algonquin Park to immortality and A.Y. Jackson was doing the same for Algoma's first snowfalls, Prudence Heward, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage and a number of other women were making similar magic on canvases in Montreal. They were members of the Beaver Hall Group, a collection of Montreal artists who shared studio space on Beaver Hall Hill in downtown Montreal and mutual support
Feb 5, 2006
Janice Kennedy
The Ottawa Citizen
The bold strokes and muscular Northern landscapes of the Group of Seven are imprinted on the Canadian soul. Even the most artistically untutored Canadian is familiar with names such as A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer and that honorary gang member, Tom Thomson.
Absent from that iconographic imprint, however, are works such as At the Cafe, Fort of the Sulpician Seminary, April in the Laurentians. Absent are Prudence Heward, Sarah Robertson and Anne Savage.
And yet at a time when Thomson was committing the jack pines of Algonquin Park to immortality and Jackson was doing the same for Algoma's first snowfalls, Heward, Robertson, Savage and a number of other women were making similar magic on canvases in Montreal. Occasionally, they were even recognized for it by art critics and fellow artists, including members of the Group of Seven who allowed some of the women to exhibit with them.
The women were members of the Beaver Hall Group, a collection of Montreal artists who shared studio space on Beaver Hall Hill in downtown Montreal and mutual support. Founded in 1920, the same year as the Group of Seven, the Montreal bunch consisted of both women and men (including Montreal native A.Y. Jackson, who belonged to both), though it was the women who drew most of the kudos during the four exhibitions the Beaver Hall Group staged between 1920 and 1922. After it disbanded formally, the group continued with informal fluidity among the women, who maintained their friendships and loose association.
But while collectors and others knowledgeable in Canadian art remained familiar with them through the decades after their deaths their paintings hang in prestigious private collections and public venues such as the National Gallery, the Beaverbrook and both the Musee d'art contemporain and the Beaux-Arts in Montreal the average Canadian today knows little of them.
Which, culturally speaking, is a tragedy.
That is why the new book by Canadian art educator Evelyn Walters is such a rich and timely contribution. The Women of Beaver Hall : Canadian Modernist Painters (Dundurn Press, $60) is a handsome book in the finest coffee-table tradition, its pages thick and glossy, its more than 65 plates in full colour. But it's much more than that, too.
Striding far beyond the narrow borders usually associated with coffee tables, The Women of Beaver Hall is at once exposition, homage and feminist celebration of 10 remarkable artists.
That last is not meant as some agenda-driven political claim. Some of the women, who lived roughly from 1880 to 1980, might have recoiled slightly at feminist labelling. They were, after all, products of their time, place and social circumstances. But there is no doubt that, in the broadest sense of the word, they were indeed feminists.
They broke barriers and thumbed their noses at convention. They pioneered. They defiantly made art as women in an art world dominated by men.
Walters, who explored the Beaver Hall Group in her doctoral thesis and has since done even more research into it, writes with clarity and concise readability as she brings these extraordinary women to life. Her uncluttered introduction describes the birth of the Montreal group and places it in context. That is followed by 10 brief but enlightening biographical sketches, each one accompanied by several rich sample reproductions of the artist's work. It is a clean, straightforward approach, perfect as a kind of primer to introduce a group of artists and a body of work to whole new generations of potential enthusiasts.
All the women Nora Collyer, Emily Coonan, Heward, Mabel Lockerby, Henrietta Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Robertson, Savage and Ethel Seath were Montreal natives, and most of them were born into the anglo-Protestant establishment. But they were a diverse group despite that shared identity, a group that became even more diverse through the years as various family fortunes were reversed, war and the Depression were experienced, and illness and tragedy left their indelible mark.
Though shy, Collyer travelled broadly and lived till the end with her companion Margaret Reid, whom she nursed through Reid's declining years in the grip of Alzheimer's disease. Newton divorced her husband and brought up her son on her own, despite social disapprobation and bouts of depression, earning her living as a popular portrait artist. Savage taught art in public schools, gave radio broadcasts and remained compassionate always, taking in war refugees and looking after a childhood nanny.
Through it all, there were the paintings, a symphonic range of inhabited landscapes and portraits in representations that are bold, quiet, innovative, warm, subtle, passionate.
Lockerby offers up quintessential Canada in March and Early Winter, as well as evocative imagery that is pure Montreal in After a Snowstorm. Morris, who lived in Ottawa from 1922-29, engages the viewer with a lovingly folkloric depiction of the ByWard Market on market day. Newton captures fragility and beauty in Portrait of Madame Lily Valty.
There is variety, too, even within the body of the same artist's work. Lockerby's early impressionism gives way to whimsical images of striking fantasy. Seath's wild, almost abstract Undergrowth stands in dramatic contrast to the traditional gentleness of her earlier Gardener's House, where a cloaked trio heads for a gate in a winter setting that is pure Canadiana.
The work overall, which Walters describes as a combination of modernist and traditional, also betrays occasional stylistic similarities to Group of Seven pieces. May's 1925 piece Melting Snow, for example, is a vivid reminder of Harris. But there is also in each of the Beaver Hall women a uniqueness a sensibility that is both female (if not traditionally feminine) and informed by specific currents of their time, place and relationships.
Walters cites A.Y. Jackson's assessment of Heward, who died in 1947 at age 51: ``She never got the recognition she richly deserved in her lifetime. I wanted her to join the Group of Seven, but like the Twelve Apostles, no women were included.''
And posterity, it follows, was the poorer for their exclusion.
Walters's respectful presentation of these 10 remarkable women, lovingly wrapped in a mini-exhibition of some of their finest work, is an inspired act of redress.
2. Quebec’s Group of Seven: Remembering the Canadian art collective Beaver Hall Group
January 5, 2006
CBC.ca/ Art & Design
Alison Gillmor
It might seem that art historians require only art to go about their business. In fact, they also need stories to link the works together and make them jump off gallery walls. Canadian art history has often seemed at a disadvantage when stacked against the glamorous narratives of European art — madness, mistresses, absinthe, scandals at the Salon — but really, we just need a little spin.
Take the women of the Beaver Hall Group. The work is there, from vivid post-impressionist landscapes to pared-down modernist portraiture. Now, with a brisk, approachable book by Toronto-based art historian Evelyn Walters, so are the stories.
The Women of Beaver Hall: Canadian Modernist Painters concentrates on 10 Montreal women associated with the Beaver Hall Group in the 1920s and ’30s. “We had a swell time actually,” declared Anne Savage, looking back at their years of creative camaraderie. In a quiet, quintessentially Canadian way, they did.
The Beaver Hall Group, named after a studio at 305 Beaver Hall Hill in Montreal, was an attempt to set up a Quebec counterpart to the Group of Seven — albeit an exclusively anglophone one. Starting up in 1920 with Montreal-born A.Y. Jackson as president, the group’s official existence was brief. The exact date it shut down (because of financial constraints) is disputed; Walters’s best estimate is 1922. But the group’s influence went far beyond those two short years. Although the Beaver Hall Group was open to both men and women, it was the women who initially gained the most attention, and who remained in close contact in the decades that followed; many of them later participated in the avant-garde Atelier, the Canadian Group of Painters and the Canadian Art Society.
Until recently, these women were often treated as gifted dilettantes, receiving only perfunctory mentions in Canadian art texts. Barbara Meadowcroft helped to correct this trend with her 1999 book Painting Friends; Walters maintains the scholarly interest in the women’s achievements while adding gloss, bumping up the number of colour reproductions to coffee-table-book levels.
Walters draws on her 1990 doctoral work on Beaver Hall, but manages to avoid the pedantic pitfalls of many theses-turned-books. Her prose is fresh, fact-drenched and free of special pleading. She delineates the particular constraints on middle-class women of the time — when life-drawing classes were often thought to be unsuitable for “ladies” — but she doesn’t feel compelled to turn her subjects into martyrs.
Many of the women came from Montreal’s WASP ascendancy, with family houses in Westmount, summer homes in the Laurentians or on the Ontario lakes and art lessons at a posh girls school called Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s. Others scraped by in genteel poverty, particularly once the Depression hit. All of the women more or less conformed to the levels of propriety expected of their sex and class. When Prudence Heward studied in Paris at the Académie Colarossi, for example, she felt obliged to stay at the fashionable Hôtel Lutetia, far away from the bohemian garrets of her fellow students.
Though they might have conducted their private lives with strict rectitude, the women took risks in their work. In an atmosphere still generally hostile to modernism, they often used dark, heavy lines and patches of pure pigment. In 1926, the Montreal Daily Star’s Morgan Powell — clearly the Quebec equivalent of Toronto critic Hector Charlesworth, who liked to bear-bait the Group of Seven — denounced paintings by the Beaver Hall women, saying they were “marred by crudity of colouring, harsh tones, and neglect of drawing.” Now that the shock of post-impressionism has worn off, it’s hard to reconcile this kind of scorn with these gorgeous, gentle landscapes. Walters points out that the Beaver Hall artists were never drawn into the Group of Seven’s nationalist obsession with rugged and remote nature. They held more to the Quebec tradition of painting inhabited environments, often depicting streets, houses, farm equipment, at least some trace of human presence. Kathleen Morris crafted warm, bright winter scenes set in small Quebec towns, having her painterly way with snow in such works as After High Mass, Berthier-en-Haut.
The Beaver Hall Group also excelled at figure painting. Heward’s At the Theatre focuses on the pale backs of two women who are obviously more accustomed to heavy wool coats than revealing evening dress. They look endearingly vulnerable — so exposed, so chilly, so Canadian somehow. The group often expressed these kinds of Anglo-Saxon attitudes, painting with emotional astringency, tact and reserve.
Occasionally, the members dallied with more scandalous subject matter. Lilias Torrance Newton’s Nude in a Studio, which depicts a woman wearing nothing but green, open-toed shoes, managed to get itself banned from the Art Gallery of Toronto (later the Art Gallery of Ontario ) in 1934 — 69 years after Manet’s Olympia caused a fuss in Paris . (Unfortunately, Torrance Newton ’s taboo work is not reproduced in the book, which is a bit of a tease.)
While the nudes grabbed headlines, in hindsight it is the group’s portraiture that seems the most revolutionary. Psychologically incisive and emotionally generous, particularly in the treatment of women, these paintings are not ingratiating society portraits but specific descriptions of character and social circumstance. The subjects are often guarded, bored or defiant. They can be disconcertingly direct ( Torrance Newton ’s Martha) or so inward-looking they’re scarcely aware of the viewer (Emily Coonan’s Girl in Dotted Dress). Several of the Beaver Hall women also offered rigorously unsentimental paintings of children. The youngsters in Heward’s Sisters of Rural Quebec exhibit spooky, Dakota Fanning-like self-possession.
The group’s success at portraiture might have something to do with their biographies, which Walters examines in dense, well-researched detail. The only Beaver Hall woman to marry was Torrance Newton , who directs an uncompromising gaze at us in her 1929 self-portrait, and she later divorced her husband at a time when divorce was uncommon. Walters makes a discreet reference to Nora Collyer’s long-time companion Margaret Reid, and points to the tantalizing possibility that Mabel Lockerby secretly wed her cousin Ernest McKnown. (Although they never lived together, he claimed they married before he shipped out to serve in World War One.) Meanwhile, Savage was known to have turned down a proposal from her mentor, A.Y. Jackson.
Their lives as unmarried women were in one sense constricted — it was considered improper for single women to travel alone, so the artists’ close alliance was as much a professional necessity as a personal choice. In another sense, the Beaver Hall women gained the strange, subversive freedom of spinsterhood. Often unnoticed themselves, they were free to notice others. This quality of observation — partaking of the same tart but empathetic tone that animates Jane Austen’s novels — is perhaps what made them such astonishing portraitists.
Just because these women didn’t enter into traditional marriages didn’t mean they were free from domestic responsibilities. Lockerby helped run a household of sisters; Henrietta Mabel May delayed her education to care for nine younger siblings; Sarah Robertson looked after her difficult, domineering mother; and Collyer kept house for her father and brother. These women studied, taught, volunteered and still managed to create landmark Canadian art works.
It is probably this staunch hard work that inspired the passage on Walters’s dedication page. She quotes from a book on successful dairy-farming written by Heward’s doughty grandmother, Eliza M. Jones, in 1892: “…to my sisters in toil, the tired and over-tasked women, who are wearing their lives away in work which has little hope and less profit.”
A lot of 21st-century women, artistic or otherwise, might connect with that sentiment. The women of Beaver Hall might have led sheltered lives compared to, say, Picasso, but they were, in their own way, a pretty remarkable group.
The Women of Beaver Hall: Canadian Modernist Painters, by Evelyn Walters, is published by the Dundurn Group, and is in bookstores now.
Alison Gillmor is a writer based in Winnipeg .
Image: Lilias Torrance Newton , Nude in a Studio (cropped). Sold by Ritchies Auction House in February 2001 for a record $65,000. Now part of the Thomson collection.
3. Books in Canada
December 2005 Vol 34, no. 9
The Women of Beaver Hall: Canadian Modernist Painters
Olga Stein
The Beaver Hall Group was an association of Quebec artists which officially began its existence in 1920. Under the leadership of A.Y. Jackson, the group attracted and fostered the work of artists interested in the newest European trends and unconcerned about the consequences of cold-shouldering traditional approaches to subject representation. Remarkably, unlike its Ontario counterpart, the Group of Seven, the Beaver Hall Group had a large contingent of female artists, and though the Group prided itself on its eschewal of any bias-related to class, gender, or artistic preference-it seems to have been especially hospitable to women and proved an excellent springboard for their careers. The work of ten of its most successful women is celebrated in this book with colour plates and short but not uninformative biographies. The book is therefore of some historical value in addition to being a beautifully produced "art book" richly exhibiting works that deserve to be known and admired.
The ten women on view here are Nora Collyer, Emily Coonan, Prudence Heward, Mabel Lockerby, Henrietta Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage, and Ethel Seath. All ten were born in the last quarter of the 19th century. Kathleen Morris was the last to pass away in 1986.
The Art Association of Montreal, which evolved into the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, was the art school of note in early 20th-century Montreal, and provided a thorough grounding in drawing and painting, supplementing technical studies with frequent lectures and a library of books and catalogues. The Beaver Hall elite begun their education there, but were later encouraged to break free of conventional ideas concerning both art and the role of women in society and the professions.
I'm greatly taken with the portraits of Emily Coonan (Italian Girl, c. 1921, Girl in Dotted Dress, c. 1923), Prudence Heward (At the Theatre, 1928, Girl in the Window, 1941, and At the Cafe, n.d.), and Lilias Torrance Newton (Portrait of Madame Lily Valty, n.d.), Self-Portrait, c. 1929, Lady in Black, c. 1936). These works are phenomenal-timeless, existing outside of any period or style, despite the modernist label. Coonan's and Heward's work is often haunting; the women portrayed are in a space of their own, looking inward and sad. Lilias Torrance Newton 's models are beautiful, confident, and look to be nearly within reach of the personal liberty and independence North American women enjoy today.
There are superb landscapes here. When Henrietta Mabel May didn't allow herself to be overly influenced by European impressionists, she did unique work (In the Laurentians, n.d., Melting Snow, c. 1925, Summertime, c. 1935). Every reproduction of Anne Savage's work in this book is gorgeous and original (Yellow Days, Lake Wonish, 1960, La Maison Rouge, Dorval, c. 1928, Northern Town, Banff, c. 1938). The same can be said of the distinctive, illustrative paintings of Ethel Seath (The White Barn, Eastern Townships, c. 1941, Pears in a Window, before 1944, Undergrowth, 1954). I don't have room here to precis the careers or personal histories of these talented, dedicated women, many of whom served their communities as volunteers or educators, and accomplished a great deal besides their art. I would encourage readers interested in fine Canadian art to seek this book out and get to know the works and the women who painted them.
Olga Stein (Books in Canada )
4. New Book Examines Canada 's Hidden Treasures: The Women of Beaver Hall.
TORONTO , ONTARIO , October 30, 2005 . In many ways the witty and sophisticated Lilias Torrance Newton was ahead of her time. She married on condition that she could spend three months of the year studying in Paris , she divorced when divorce was frowned upon, raised a child on her own, and supported herself as a portrait painter in a traditionally male profession.
Lilias Torrance Newton is but one of the ten Montreal women, contemporaries of the Group of Seven, who are the focus of The Women Of Beaver Hall: Canadian Modernist Painters. Whether it was Lilias Torrance Newton, the reclusive Emily Coonan, who suddenly withdrew from public at the height of her career, or Anne Savage, who decided against marrying A.Y. Jackson, their private lives often attracted more attention than their paintings.
Like the Group of Seven, the Beaver Hall women were Modernists struggling against the Victorian tastes of the time, but unlike the Group of Seven who became Canada's most recognized artists, the women were ignored and their paintings left to gather dust in the vaults of our galleries.
Evelyn Walters brings to light the work of a group who, despite social mores and their often prestigious backgrounds, forged a place for women in the male-dominated art world. Creating an identifiable Canadian art did not much concern them. They were more interested in new techniques and in shifting emphasis from landscape imagery to the personal aspects of expression. Many embraced the Quebec Francophone tradition that landscapes include signs of habitation: the picture could be devoid of man himself, but not of his tools, buildings or other imprints of civilization. For the most part the paintings are small in scale, depict tranquil country scenes, and combine both modernist and traditional styles.
The over sixty-five colour plates gleaned from galleries and private collections make this hard-cover book a work of art in itself and a must-have for every library. As a reference, it is arranged alphabetically by artist, with biographies, exhibition lists, endnotes, and a bibliography. Its readable style is directed to the aficionado and scholar alike.
With an increasing number of retrospective exhibitions, soaring prices at auction, and the upcoming release of The Women of Beaver Hall , Canada is at last discovering another of its hidden treasures.
About the author:
Evelyn Walters' expertise on the Beaver Hall Group is an outgrowth of her doctoral thesis on Canadian women and from research for a personal art collection. After teaching in France and Montreal , she recently moved to Toronto where she has been actively involved in the Canadian art scene.
5. BY WOMAN'S HAND
When visiting your local library it will be well worth your while to borrow a video of the National Film Board's By Woman's Hand. This 60 minute film by Pepita Ferrari and Erna Buffie (narrated by Kim Nelligan) is a documentary exploring the life and times of three of the Beaver Hall women artists ---Prudence Heward, Sarah Robertson, and Anne Savage.
Although Prudence and her friends showed their work with the Group of Seven and exhibited to favourable reviews around the world, their paintings all but disappeared after their deaths. Trapped in a world that placed the greatest value on the work of men, their paintings remained on the walls of family homes or hidden in the vaults of galleries.
"subtly constructed and wonderfully comprehensive, with a richness and depth that few films manage to achieve" --- Will Aitkins, CBC Radio
6. EDWIN HOLGATE (CATALOGUE)
If you were unable to attend the Edwin Holgate touring exhibition, you should have a look at the catalogue put together by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The articles and the wood engravings suggest that Holgate was a better printmaker than painter.
All of which begs the question: Why did the MMFA choose to mount a retrospective of a male member of the Beaver Hall Group while once again overlooking the women? Holgate was also the eighth member of the Group of Seven, but haven't we had enough of the Group of Seven?
Update: A more comprehensive Beaver Hall exhibition is now in the planning stages.
7. AY
Not only one of Canada's most famous painters but also a delightful raconteur, A Y Jackson reminisces about 
the adventures he shared with Group of Seven members, Lawren Harris, Frederick Varley, Tom Thomson and others. Originally recorded at the home of friends in 1956 when he was 74 years old, this remastered CD is available from The Women's Art Association in Toronto. Proceeeds from the sales support scholarships for young artists.
Women's Art Association of Canada
23 Prince Arthur Avenue, Toronto
416-922-2060
8. ANNE SAVAGE: THE STORY OF A CANADIAN PAINTER
by Anne McDougall
Anne Douglas Savage was a leading member of the Beaver Hall Group. Her paintings can be found in major galleries such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
The book focusses on Anne Savage's life-long correspondence with A.Y. Jackson, president of the Beaver Hall Group and member of the Group of Seven. The selected letters not only provide insight into their personal relationship, but also a running commentary on artistic matters during a critical half-century of Canadian art.
Illustrations include works by Anne Savage and informal photos of A. Y. Jackson and other Canadian painters in their customary haunts.
The author, Anne McDougall, or Anne MacDermot, as she has been known in her journalistic career, is a niece of Anne Savage. She brings intimate memories and insights into the biography of an outstanding Canadian artist and teacher.
9. INDEPENDENT SPIRIT: EARLY CANADIAN WOMEN ARTISTS
by A. K. Prakash
Dealer/collector A. K. Prakash singles out the artists who made significant contributions to the history of Canadian art from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Images of eighty works are presented in detail, some with analysis and artist biographies. Included in the survey is an annotated list of more than 500 early Canadian artists.
The thirty-six featured artists are Emily Carr, Florence Carlyle, Paraskeva Clark, Emily Coonan, Rody Kenny Courtice, Kathleen Daly, Mary Bell Eastlake, Marcelle Ferron, Mary Riter Hamilton, Prudence Heward, Frances Anne Hopkins, Yvonne McKague Housser, Frances Jones, Maude Lewis, Mabel Lockerby, Marion Long, Laura Muntz Lyall, Pegi Nicol MacLeod, Florence McGillivray, Helen McNicoll, Mabel May, Kathleen Moir Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sophie Pemberton, Christiane Pflug, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage, Charlotte Schreiber, Ethel Seath, Regina Seiden, Henrietta Shore, Jori Smith, Elizabeth Wyn Wood, and Florence Wyle.
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