Painting FriendsThe Beaver Hall Women Painters
Barbara Meadowcroft
Art History
Painting Friends tells the story of ten Montreal women who met at art school in the early 1900s and formed friendships that lasted all their lives. They had successful professional careers, exhibiting with the Group of Seven and at international exhibitions during the 1920s and 1930s. Despite their achievements, they have been largely overlooked by art historians. Painting Friends is the first book-length study of these gifted women—Emily Coonan, Nora Collyer, Prudence Heward, Mabel Lockerby, Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage, and Ethel Seath.
Drawing on over 100 interviews with the painters' friends and families as well as archival sources, Barbara Meadowcroft demonstrates how the support the women gave each other was essential to their success in the male-dominated art world, and discusses their paintings in the context of the social and political circumstances of the period. These painters were superb colourists, as shown in the 24 colour plates included in the book.
Painting Friends will appeal to those interested in art and/or women's lives. Chronologies of the painters and a list of their exhibitions are included.
Dr. Barbara Meadowcroft has had a life-long interest in the arts, particularly literature and painting. After writing her doctoral dissertation on writer Arthur Stringer (her great-uncle), she became a Research Fellow at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute of Concordia University. She has written articles on Canadian women painters, including catalogue essays for the retrospective exhibitions of Anne Savage and Lilias Torrance Newton at the Walter Klinkhoff Gallery in Montreal.
ISBN: 978-1-55065-125-6