Canadian artists – my daily art display

Mary Evelyn Wrinch

“…I have always been a person with one idea. I had no other ambition than to become an artist. It was the only thing I ever wanted to do...”

Mary E. Wrinch A.R.C.A.

Mary Evelyn Wrinch, an English-born Canadian, was born in 1877 in the Northeast Essex village of Kirby-le-Soken. Her parents were Leonard and Elizabeth Cooper Wrinch. When Mary was eight years old her father died and she and her mother emigrated to Bronte, Ontario, and after a return trip to England, in 1889, they relocated permanently to Canada and went to live in Toronto.

Blossom Time by Mary E Wrinch

Whilst living in Toronto, Mary attended Bishop Strachan School, a private school in the Forest Hill area and Canada’s oldest independent day and boarding school. In 1889, Mary Wrinch enrolled at the Central Ontario School of Art where she studied with George Agnew Reid along with Impressionist painter, Laura Adeline Muntz and naturalist painter, Robert Holmes. It was a four-year course during which she studied both printmaking and painting.

Wakefield Garden by Mary E Wrinch (1917)

After achieving a number of awards, she began graduate studies at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London and remained there until 1899 under the direction of Walter Donne. After this, Mary Wrinch returned to Toronto where she again studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design with Lyall, Holmes and Reid. She later enrolled for two private art classes, one in London, England with Alyn Williams, a Welsh artist born in Wrexham, who later became president of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters. The other private classes she attended was in New York, run by Alice Beckington, an American artist who was a founder member of the American Society of Miniature Painters, an organization she served as president for a number of years, from 1905 to 1916. She also taught miniature painting at the Art Students League.

Poppies by Mary E Wrinch (1917)

When Mary was in her early twenties she opened her own studio in the Arcade Building on Toronto’s Yonge Street. Her former tutors, George Agnew Reid and Laura Muntz also had studios in the building. Around this time Mary began to concentrate her art with specialized miniature portraits. In 1906, she travelled to France and was strongly influenced by the works of Monet, Pissarro and Sisley and when she returned to Canada, she brought back a large number of small, beautifully crafted Impressionist sketches. Her time in France also converted her to plein air landscape painting and she recalled that time saying:

“… It was such a revelation being in France at that time. Coming into contact with Impressionism was like being let loose with a box of coloured candy…”

Falling Leaves by Mary E Winch

In 1912 she returned to Europe for a second time and travelled around France and Italy, continuously sketching and painting. Although pleased with her work there were many detractors in the press who claimed her northern Ontario landscape paintings were too modernist. She was undeterred and carried on painting until 1928 when she stopped and concentrated on colour woodcuts.

Class at Bishop Strachan School, Toronto (1915)

Mary Wrinch, apart from dedicating her life to her art, was still a single woman and had also to support herself financially and so taught art at the Bishop Strachan School, Toronto, her alma mater, and Canada’s oldest independent day and boarding school for girls. She worked there from 1901 until 1936 as Art Director.

Abitibi Canyon, Ontario by Mary E Winch

Mary owned a summer residence in a two-storey cottage at Kingwood, Lake of Bays, a township municipality within the District Municipality of Muskoka, Ontario, Canada, situated 193 kilometres (120 miies) north of Toronto. Mary spent hours sketching and painting and for relaxation and exercise would canoe on the lake. It was, whilst living in the beautiful Ontario landscape, that she changed her method of painting. She now painted directly from nature on canvases over a metre high and wide.

Sawmill, Muskoka by Mary Wrinch (1907)

In 1907 she exhibited her large (84 x 86cms) painting entitled Sawmill, Muskoka at the Ontario Society of Artists. It was subsequently purchased by the Government of Ontario. Six years later she was interviewed about this work and its size and she justified it saying:

“…Somehow our Canadian landscapes call for a big canvas and for direct, out of door painting. When you do it small, you lose much of its very essence…”

Funchal Madeira by Mary E Winch

Although spending summers at Lake of Bays, during the Winter months she stayed and worked in her studio in Wychwood Park, an arts and crafts community, founded in the late nineteenth century, as a private project by painter Marmaduke Matthews and businessman Alexander Jardine. Between 1900 and 1922 she worked closely with and studied under George Agnew Reid, a well known Toronto painter and former tutor.

Mortgaging the Homestead by G A Reid

After briefly apprenticing with an architect, Reid was trained at the Ontario School of Art, Toronto in 1879, where he studied with Robert Harris. From there, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1882 to 1885 where he was a protégé of Thomas Eakins who appointed him a demonstrator in anatomy classes. He also studied at the Académie Julian, with Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, and the Prado in Madrid. George Agnew Reid, who signed his name as G. A. Reid, was a Canadian artist, painter, influential educator and administrator. He is best known for his genre paintings, but his work also included historical, portrait and landscape subjects.

Portrait of George Agnew Reid by Mary Hiester Reid, (1895)

Reid met his first wife artist Mary Hiester Reid at the Pennsylvania Academy, and the couple married in 1885. Mary, also a talented artist, became financially successful and received significant reviews in the Toronto press. In 1893, she was elected an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, one of the first women elected. He and his wife also made a number of study trips to Europe later, during which they visited France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. George Agnew Reid remained with his wife until her death in 1921.

Ponte Vecchio Florence by Mary E Wrinch (1914)

Mary Wrinch had known Reid since being his student and also was part of Reid and his wife’s circle of artistic friends in Wychwood Park. The Park was an ideal painting site for its beauty which was then still a rural region on the edge of the city. The park which was named by Marmaduke Matthews after Wychwood forest in Oxfordshire, England. Reid had built himself and his wife an Elizabethan-styled grand manor house with a walled garden and a pool known as Upland Cottage. In 1910 Reid built Mary Wrinch an independent home-studio on Alcina Avenue which was just one block away from where he and his wife Mary lived.

Cineraria by Mary E Winch (1924)

A year later in 1922, following the death of his wife, Reid married forty-five-year-old Mary Evelyn Wrinch his former student at the Central Ontario School of Art in Toronto. Once married, Mary moved into Upland Cottage and was delighted to take charge of the large garden. Later the couple went off exploring and painting the beauty of Northern Canada, visiting Northern Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. Despite marrying Reid, Mary Winch persisted in using her maiden name, Mary E. Winch when signing her paintings. For her it was important to maintain her professional identity.

Scarboro’ Linocut by May E Wrinch (c.1938)

In 1928, when Mary Wrinch was fifty-one, she decided on a complete change of artistic style. She then embraced the art of lino-cut printing and copied her original landscape paintings to achieve intricate highly colourful prints with strong outlines. She also completed floral prints using flowers from her own garden. Mary was influenced by the Japanese woodcut masters such as Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro and from their works she developed techniques in block printmaking. By 1944 Mary Wrinch had completely given up painting to concentrate on her printmaking.

After 25 years of marriage to Wrinch, her husband, George Agnew Reid died at the age of 87 in 1947. Mary Wrinch died in Toronto in 1969 at age 90.

Apart from Wikipedia, most of the information for this blog came from these excellent websites:

Moynahan Studio: FemArt Friday: Mary Evelyn Wrinch

Art Windsor Essex

Female self-Representation and the Public Trust

Jean-Pierre Valentin Gallery

Rookleys

The Corner Store by Lawren Harris (c.1920)

A few weeks ago I visited family in London and as usual I just had time to take in one art gallery as recompense for a crowded, although fast, rail journey. The problem I faced was which gallery to visit. I suppose logically I should go for the Leonardo exhibition on at the National Gallery which is receiving such rave reviews. However as I thought it would be too crowded I postponed that delight until next January. In the end I plumped for the Dulwich Gallery which lies south of the Thames and went to see a Canadian art exhibition entitled Painting Canada, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Over the next few weeks I will give you a taste of some of the works by Thomson himself and some of the other artists who were part of The Group of Seven.

The Group of Seven, also sometimes known as the Alonquin School, were a group of Canadian landscape painters from 1920-1933. The seven members of the group were Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, Alexander Young (A.Y.) Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, James Edward Hervey (J.E.H.) MacDonald and Frederick Varley. Tom Thomson who was part of the movement died in 1917 before the official formation and naming of the Group of Seven but has always been considered one of the group’s founders. This group of artists was to become noted for its works, which were inspired by the landscape of their country and in some ways are looked upon as being part of the first Canadian national art movement.

Many of the movement, namely Thomson, Varley, Lismer, MacDonald, Johnston and Carmichael had met when they all worked at Grip Limited, which was the name of the Toronto design firm and which was home to many of Canada’s foremost designers and painters during the first half of the 20th century. Later the final two members of the group, Jackson and Harris would join the firm. The Group was financially sound due, in the main, to the financial support from one of its members, Lawren Harris, whose parents owned the Massey Harris farm machinery company which would be later known as Massey Ferguson.

My choice for the first featured artist of the Group of Seven is Lawren Harris. Lawren was born in Brantford, Ontario in 1885. He was the first born of two sons. Lawren had a radically different background from that of the other artists of the Group of Seven. As I said earlier, Lawren came from a wealthy conservative family of industrialists as the Harris family was co-owners of the Massey-Harris agricultural equipment conglomerate. Harris had the luxury every aspiring artist could only dream of and he was able to pursue a career in the arts without ever having to worry about holding down a regular job.

He was privately educated and received his initial education at the Central Technical School and later the independent St Andrew’s College at Rosedale. At the age of nineteen he went to Berlin to study where he remained for three years. There he studied philosophy and became interested in theosophy, which in its modern presentation, is a spiritual philosophy which has developed since the late 19th century.

He returned to Canada in 1908 and once again settled in Toronto and became a founder member of the Arts and Letters Club, which was a club whose sole purpose was to be a rendezvous where people of diverse interests might meet for mutual fellowship and artistic creativity.

One may have thought that Harris, with his wealthy background, would concentrate on the wealthy aspects of life in Toronto for the subjects of his art but in fact his first subject after returning from Berlin was a series of six paintings of houses in what was known as the Ward, an area where much of the Toronto immigrants lived. My featured painting in My Daily Art Display today is one Harris completed in 1920, entitled The Corner Store and is housed at the Art Gallery of Ontario and is in complete contrast to his later paintings which I will feature in a forthcoming blog along with the rest of his life story. The painting is not of one of the beautiful mansions of his home area of Rosedale but of a simple building which housed the local grocery store. Lawren Harris appreciated the simplicity of its structure which contrasted with the complicated and erratic patterns of the shadows cast by the trees on the shop’s frontage. I love the way the bright winter sunlight illuminates the shop’s façade. I love the colours of the pale green wooden window shutters which contrast beautifully with the terracotta- red trim of the window surrounds. Look at the tranquil and cloudless blue sky above the building. This is a beautiful portrayal of a winter’s scene.

In a few months time a number of us will be overwhelmed by snow and curse winter so maybe snow is a beautiful thing if it is reserved for postcards, Christmas cards and paintings like this one.