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Visual Arts by FFWD Staff Painting Friends: The Beaver Hall Women Painters By Barbara Meadowcroft Vèhicule Press, 240 pp. Painting Friends deals with the art and the lives and times of ten women who practised art in the first part of the 20th century in Montreal. They first met in art school at the Art Association of Montreal and were, to varying degrees, successful as painters and recognised during their lifetimes by their contemporaries. Many of these women exhibited with the Group of Seven and showed their work in the United States and England. They were active, exhibiting members of the Canadian Group of Painters (formed in 1933 after the Group of Seven broke up). Between 1926 and 1933, the National Gallery of Canada held annual exhibitions of Canadian art and it was from these exhibitions that Eric Brown, the director, purchased a large number of paintings by them. Yet today, most of their works languish in vaults, are rarely shown and Canadians do not know their names. It seems as if most of them have been wiped off the map of Canadian art history. They tend to be treated summarily, if at all, in the standard (and by now sorely outdated and banal) art history surveys of Canadian art. Barbara Meadowcroft's work in this field will go a long way toward remedying this situation. A compelling synthesis of social and cultural history, art history, and feminism, Painting Friends is the product of 10 years of research and, it seems, a labour of love. Ethel Seath, one of the Beaver Hall women, was the author’s teacher. In 1987, Meadowcroft attended a retrospective exhibition of Seath’s work in Montreal and was struck by the high quality of the art. Due to the fact that most of the work was drawn from private collections, Meadowcroft realized that after the exhibition closed, Seath’s paintings would once again be consigned to oblivion. This insight was the catalyst that led to this book. In 1920, two groups of artists were formed in Canada. The one in Toronto called itself the Group of Seven. The other group, made up of 11 men and eight women, was based in Montreal. It was known as the Beaver Hall Group because its members shared studio space in a house located at 305 Beaver Hall Hill. Although the official group disbanded less than two years later, six women artists continued to rent studio space in the house until 1924. At this time, social clubs excluded women, and for them, Beaver Hall was like an exclusive clubhouse. Mabel May, Lilias Torrance Newton, Mabel Lockerby, Anne Savage, Nora Collyer and Sarah Robertson established an informal network of professional women artists that expanded to included three other women painters: Seath, Prudence Heward and Kathleen Morris. They referred to themselves as "our gang" and "our little group," having no agenda, no charter and no rules – only a spirit of camaraderie and a shared passion for painting. For each woman, it was the mutual support, the discussions about art and the many painting excursions they enjoyed together that kept her going in a male dominated world, contributing immeasurably to the development of her art. It is their friendship that is the sustaining leitmotif of Meadowcroft's book. Artistically, the women dealt primarily with portraiture, landscapes, still life, and urban scenes. Stylistically, they demonstrated a restrained form of modernist sensibility in which elements of the natural world were stylized and simplified into broad patterns, differentiated by line and colour. Compared to the more monumental canvasses of the Group of Seven, featuring a remote and unpopulated wilderness, the paintings of the Beaver Hall women are much more modest in scale and tend to humanize the land, usually the Quebec countryside, with clear evidence of human labour and habitation. Heward’s work was the most daring and original of the group – crisply articulated, powerful representations of women and children that expressed the complex and often ambivalent roles of women in society. In the first two chapters of her book, Meadowcroft sets the stage by exploring the social and cultural situation in Montreal before and after the turn of the century, when opportunities for women artists were limited. This part of the book is quite dry. However, when Meadowcroft begins to deal with the personal lives of the women, and the particular circumstances of their worlds, the book becomes very engaging for the reader. Except for Coonan, all the women were upper middle-class Protestant, English-speaking Montrealers. Meadowcroft effectively conveys the advantages and limitations of this social milieu. All the women were spinsters (except for Newton who later divorced), and lived with their families and maintained their working studios at home after 1924. For most women of this class and certainly of this era, marriage and a career as a professional artist were incompatible. Teaching was an option – Savage and Seath were art teachers for most of their working lives. Meadowcroft's book is meticulously researched and broad in its scope. It examines art and artists within a social, cultural and historical context and is eminently readable without being facile. As evidenced by the extensive bibliography, appendices and detailed endnotes (a valuable resource), Meadowcroft has made use of every available published and unpublished source, as well as archival material and countless personal interviews with family members, colleagues and friends of the women artists. In short, oxymoron though it seems, Painting Friends is an enjoyable scholarly book.

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