From the summit of Beaver Hall Hill
“Autumn in the Laurentians” by Henrietta Mabel May
Ah, feisty women painters, and they called themselves the Beaver Hall Gang. Well, Beaver Hall Group, actually, Beaver Hall Hill being a street in downtown Montreal where they had a studio at #305 during the 1920s. Most had studed at a local Art Association school that became the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where William Brymner taught them to go with modern art, and they did.
“Beaver Hall Hill” by Kathleen Morris, 1936 — check the same view on Google Earth below.
Originally there were more men than women in the group — 11 to eight — and the boss was AY Jackson, another Quebecois who was also running with the Group of Seven. Edwin Holgate was involved too. But the girls were serious and not about to be tossed off as weekend decorators. When the original outfit folded after just two years, the women strived onward as a mutually supportive unit, gradually attracting more of the sisterhood and some of them exhibiting with the Group of Seven both at home and in the States and England.
“Joseph and Marie-Louise” by Sarah Robertson, from about 1930
The best-known members went down in history as the “Final Nine”: Nora Collyer, Prudence Heward, Mabel Lockerby, Henrietta Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage and Ethel Seath. These artists made a go of the struggle, and ultimately — it took a lifetime and more — they came out on top. See the rest.
If necessity was one of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, then poverty must have been its wetnurse and greed the recurring colic that made it bawl all the time. Or something like that. You see, it’s just like the late American economist Milton Friedman said: “The problem of social organisation is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. Capitalism is that kind of a system.”
