Quebec’s Group of Seven

At the Theatre, by Prudence Heward. 1928, oil on canvas. Courtesy The Dundurn Group.

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.

Waiting at the Old Church, Berthierville, Quebec, by Kathleen Morris. c. 1923, oil on Canvas. Courtesy The Dundurn Group.

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.)

Sisters of Rural Quebec, by Prudence Heward. 1930, oil on canvas. Courtesy The Dundurn Group.

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.