HELEN McNICOLL: AN IMPRESSIONIST JOURNEY
A CELEBRATION OF LIGHT!
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
June 20, 2024 - January 5, 2025
Helen McNicoll (1879-1915) and her work is featured this summer in an exhibition at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ). The MNBAQ is proud to present the first Québec retrospective in a century of the Canadian impressionist painter’s work. Visitors will discover an artist whose destiny was both quite incredible and fleeting. She is a little-known but a fascinating artist noteworthy for her outstanding mastery of light and atmospheric effects. The visitors will experience the irresistible charm of her work and her outstanding mastery of light and atmospheric effects. “Painter of the sun,” “A painter who spreads sunlight on her canvases,” and “A painter who addresses the senses” are some of the characteristics that qualify this artist.
The Helen McNicoll. An Impressionist Journey exhibition has been conceived through the prism of travel and the effervescence of a period and by examining the themes of independence, friendship, and women’s freedom. The retrospective exhibition assembles more than 65 paintings, of which 25 come from the remarkable collection of philanthropist and art lover Pierre Lassonde, and the remainder from 15 institutional and private collections and also includes sketches, a watercolour, and photographs presented in a refined setting. It invites visitors on a voyage and, above all, to experience an adventure bathed in vibrant, shimmering colours.
The exhibition also highlights the work of a free painter who pushed the boundaries as an independent professional woman at a time when women were often confined to the domestic sphere, thereby contributing to the recognition on the world stage of Québec and Canadian art. The splendidly luminous exhibition reveals a major timeless, indeed essential, body of work
A remarkable destiny
Born in Toronto in the late 19th century, Helen McNicoll grew up in Montréal in a well-to-do environment. Her parents were recent British immigrants to Canada who encouraged artistic practice. Scarlet fever rendered her deaf at the age of 2 and her parents encouraged her from childhood to develop her artistic and musical creativity despite her handicap.
The McNicoll family’s wealth meant that she could paint freely without having to worry about selling her works or teaching to support herself. Moreover, family relationships afforded her contact with Montréal’s leading art collectors at the time.
At the Art Association of Montréal McNicoll studied with William Brymner (1855-1925), who encouraged his students to travel in Europe to further their training. She made London, then a prosperous art centre, her base, where she undoubtedly discovered more progressive work than what was being done in Canada.
Helen McNicoll, who was noteworthy for her love of travel and the discovery of new spaces, undoubtedly perceived her relationship to the world and her artistic output linked to fledgling tourism at the turn of the 20th century.
Her European travels put McNicoll in direct contact with the innovative styles teeming in these artistic communities and gave her a special understanding of the development of impressionism and post-impressionism. Stimulated by all these influences, McNicoll painted landscapes focusing on rural life and genre scenes. She developed a fresh, brilliant style that became her own distinct language.
The artist also played a significant role in bridging North American and European art. She was celebrated in her lifetime for the high quality of her light-bathed rural or seaside landscapes and intimate scenes in which feminine subjects predominate.
Helen McNicoll’s brief but prolific career was shaped by the presentation of scores of works at exhibitions in Canada and England for which she received awards for her mastery of light and her unique pictorial representation. In addition to the other awards, she was elected in 1913 to the Royal Society of British Artists and, in 1914, was one of the rare women elected as associate members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Travel as a way of life
Helen McNicoll settled in London. She travelled in England and Europe and frequently to Canada. She led a cosmopolitan life but at that time many artists withdrew from urban centres, especially during the summer, to paint outdoors in the countryside or in villages in order to explore landscapes.
McNicoll’s research focused on the effects of light and atmosphere, sustained by her numerous trips south of Paris, to Normandy and Brittany, Belgium, the Mediterranean, and Italy, including Venice, and to artists’ colonies, where she spontaneously refined her palette.
Praise for light and women’s work
The artist was often on the move and captured her ever-changing environment remarkably. In Brittany, she painted village market scenes in honey tones. In Venice, her attention focused on the scintillating water of the canals. The hot sand and blue sky of European beaches afforded a backdrop suited to women and girls wearing dazzling white dresses.
This ode to travel and the mastery of light also enabled her to examine the themes of female independence, risk-taking, sisterhood, and freedom for women in the stimulating context of the English suffragettes’ fight for the right to vote.
Her favourite subjects were scenes of everyday life, although her interpretation differed from that of the impressionists by focusing more closely on women’s labour and the intimate lives of women at the turn of the 20th century.
Exhibition highlights
The exhibition comprises six separate areas embellished, in the middle, with central structures, one of which recalls the shape of a compass and its cardinal points to evoke travel. It presents all the key elements of McNicoll’s artistic career: Light and Shadow, The Children’s Playground, Sketchbook, Women at Work, The Water’s Edge, Life en plein air, Lighting the Studio, and On the Boulevard.
The retrospective assembles the artist’s finest paintings, including such major works as Sunny September (1913), In the Shade of a Tree (1915), Picking Berries (1913), Stubble Fields (circa 1912), The Chintz Sofa (1913), Evening Street Scene (circa 1910) and Montreal in Winter (1911).
Sunny September (1913) is a magnificent fall scene that quickly established McNicoll’s renown with art critics and key art market stakeholders. This luminous fall day envelopes the viewer.
In the Shade of a Tree (1915), from the MNBAQ’s collection, reveals scenes of women and children that McNicoll cherished and forges links with the outstanding work of impressionist artists Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot.
Picking Berries (1913) examines the importance that McNicoll attached to outdoor painting and composition but also the context of feminine collaboration essential to the development of her career since this work is reflected in a painting by Dorothea Sharp with whom her friendly and professional relationship was fundamental.
McNicoll produced several works devoted to fields or haystacks following the example of works by Claude Monet. Stubble Fields (circa 1912) is an eloquent example. The artist put into practice in this painting several new theories of colour circulating in impressionist and post-impressionist circles since the late 19th century.
With The Chintz Sofa (1913), McNicoll briefly abandoned her sunny landscapes for interior scenes. In the painting, it is possibly Dorothea Sharp sitting on the elegant chintz sofa in the living room of the workshop that she shared with McNicoll in London. In light of the suffragettes’ struggles in the early 20th century, art historians have proposed a feminist interpretation of this scene that supports Sharp’s involvement in the Society of Women Artists.
Evening Street Scene (circa 1910) proposes an evening scene that is unique in McNicoll’s output. The electric light replaces the sun, thereby conferring on the painting a very modern note that emphasizes the artist’s interest in scenes of everyday life, as do her numerous market scenes, and for all manner of effects of light and atmosphere.
Montreal in Winter (1911) also reveals the importance of McNicoll’s travels between Canada and Europe and her interest in the snowy landscapes of her homeland. The painting reflects works by Canadian impressionists Maurice Cullen, James Wilson Morrice, Clarence Gagnon, and Marc- Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, among others.
The catalogue is the perfect complement to the exhibition
To celebrate the luminous work of Helen McNicoll, her remarkable destiny, and her contribution to the history of Québec, Canadian, and international art, a catalogue has been published to accompany the retrospective organized by the MNBAQ.
The work, which hinges principally on the notion of travel, focuses on most of McNicoll’s works exhibited, including those from Pierre Lassonde’s impressive collection. Edited by the MNBAQ and 5 Continents Editions, the 160-page bilingual (English and French) catalogue is accompanied by four essays, each of which sheds light on a facet of the artist’s work.
The introductory text by Anne-Marie Bouchard examines McNicoll’s work in the context of the mobility of women artists in the early 20th century. It broaches transatlantic travel, American and European destinations, artistic networks, and the social implications of travel. Samantha Burton provides a biographical overview of the artist that retraces the development of the artist’s career with particular emphasis on the importance of her transnational travel. Julie Nash also focuses on the notion of mobility by closely examining McNicoll’s outdoor paintings undertaken throughout her travels, including the practice centred on painting small plein-air oil sketches. Lastly, Caroline Shields and Valerie Moscato also examine the artist’s work methods through a thorough examination of her pictorial technique to attempt to grasp how she began and completed her large canvases, a still unknown aspect of her art.
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