Dali House

“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.

Nora Collyer’s “Country Village”

Most of the time they were more frequently scoffed at than saluted, one nasty reviewer dismissing the work of Mabel May and some others as “pleasant bits of colour about the walls”. Recognition, that rare beast, had a taste but didn’t make a lunch of their careers. The National Gallery has in a closet someplace 26 paintings and sketches by the most famous of the bunch, Prudence Heward, which occasionally see the light of day.

Lilias Torrance Newton’s portrait of AY Jackson

Like Prudence, though, Patience is wonderful, and the Beaver Hall Group was the subject of a 1994 documentary film by Pepita Ferrari called “By Woman’s Hand”, and a few years later Barbara Meadowcroft wrote the book on them, unambitiously titled “Painting Friends”, then Evelyn Walters came out with “The Women of Beaver Hall: Canadian Modernist Painters”.

Such belated applause stirred interest among collectors, and last year “Knitting” by May sold for $347,000, an unprecedented sum for her. (Compare that to the $600 fetched in 1930 by Heward’s “Rollande”, seen here.)

It is an interesting story, and not just for Canada. Ladies daring to do something as unfeminine as pursuing careers as painters, and on the avant-garde side as well. Heavy outlines and swatches of pure hues earned them lines like this from the Montreal Daily Star: “marred by crudity of colouring, harsh tones and neglect of drawing”.

Sarah Robertson’s “Flat Country Planting”

For their era, the landscapes were lurid, the portraits austere. The women left the undulating forests to the Group of Seven’s nation-building agenda and chronicled urban Quebec, but in no less dramatic fashion. The people they depicted stare unsentimentally out from some social miasma, “often guarded, bored or defiant”, as Alison Gillmor wrote for the CBC.

“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’).” Newton’s “Nude in a Studio” got her kicked out of the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1934. Toronto was no Paris, even then.

“Waiting at the Old Church, Berthierville, Quebec” by Kathleen Morris

Gillmor points out that Newton was the only Beaver Hall woman to marry (and unsuccessfully at that), but suggests that the “spinsterhood” nurtured in them by, for example, having to travel as a group to sketch and paint — since it was deemed improper for single women to travel alone — offered a “strange, subversive freedom”.

“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.”

Prudence Heward (1896-1947) was, like most but not all in the group, well-heeled. She had her first public showing at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in Toronto in 1924 (a group show — she didn’t go solo until ‘32), then the following year emulated American painter Mary Cassatt by moving to Paris. There she studied at the Acad้emie Colarossi in Montparnasse but shunned the bohemian bedsits for a room in a posh hotel.

Back in Canada Heward’s “Girl on a Hill” won the top prize in a competition held by the National Gallery. She frequently joined AY Jackson on sketching trips along the St Lawrence River. Seen here is her “Sisters of Rural Quebec”.

In 1933 Heward co-founded the Canadian Group of Painters, along with Anne Savage and Sarah Robertson.

Savage (1896-1971), who once actually spurned a proposal of marriage from AY Jackson, is remembered as much for her contributions to art education as to art. She spent most of her adult life teaching, including at McGill University in the 1950s. She too had had some success exhibiting in Europe. Shown here is “Charrue”.

Robertson (1891-1948) was among the handful of Canadian artists whose work was selected by juries in 1924 and 1925 to be shown at the Wembley Exhibitions in London, something of a “curiosities from the colonies” affair, but it snagged some attention.

Mabel Lockerby (1882-1976) was another member of the Canadian Group of Painters and the Contemporary Arts Society and another whose work was on view at Wembley.

Of the rest there is still little information available online, a signpost to the sad truth that the Beaver Hall Group was all but forgotten in the last decades of its century. Hopefully that gap in Internet art history will be soon filled, because these women brandished their brushes with verve and confidence.