Canada's First Professional Women Painters, 1890-1914: Their Reception in Canadian Writing on the Visual Arts

Since the modern feminist movement of the seventies, critics and art historians alike have reassessed the place held by women artists and the significance of their works. An abundance of European and North American literature has been dedicated to the topic. However, within this literature little attention has yet to be paid to the first wave of professionally-trained Canadian women painters who were active between 1890-1914. The author sets out to establish the degree to which writing on Canadian art has acknowledged the achievements of this important group and what remains to be done to present a balanced picture of the development of Canadian art that gives an appropriate place to these women. Among the thirty artists active or presumed active between 1890 and 1914 that the author examines, five were active in Montreal: Mary Alberta Cleland (1876-1960), who studied at the Art Association of Montreal in 1894, and would go on to teach there from 1898-1937 and exhibit her work at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Spring Exhibitions regularly from 1897 to 1943; the Ontario-born Jane Catherine Cummins (ca. 1841-1893) who lived in Montreal from 1886 to 1891 where she studied under Otto Reinhold Jacobi and whose work was shown in 1886 at the Dominion Exhibition in Sherbrooke and at the Montreal Art Association in 1891; the Nova Scotia-born Sarah Jean Munro MacLean (1873-1952) who was an active participant in the Montreal art scene during the 1920s; Helen Galloway McNicoll (1879-1915) who undertook her formal studies in painting at the Montreal Art Association and the Slade School of Art in London, England, and was a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy, but spent most of her life in Montreal; and Ethel Seath (1879-1963) who began work as an illustrator for "The Montreal Witness" and later "The Montreal Star" soon after finishing high school. Her commercial success allowed her to enroll at the Art Association of Montreal and, in 1911, to join Maurice Cullen's sketching trips in the Quebec countryside. In 1917, she became an art teacher at The Study, a Montreal private girls' school, where she remained for 45 years.

Master's Thesis

Concordia University

Montreal

1991

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