The landscape, portrait, and still life paintings of Montreal’s Beaver Hall group are not nearly as well known as works by the Group of Seven. Yet, like their more famous contemporaries, the Beaver Hall artists were modern intellectuals who sought original self-expression.

Why have we not heard much about them? Likely because the group was made up of 10 women – Nora Collyer, Emily Coonan, Prudence Heward, Mabel Lockerby, Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage, and Ethel Seath. They met at a Montreal art school at the turn of the century and became lifelong friends. Each went on to attain an impressive level of professionalism. Author Barbara Meadowcroft writes that she is not out to reassess their accomplishments from a feminist angle, but to fill the gap in Canadian art history with the first thorough chronology of their works and friendship.

Among the most famous was Heward, who painted exquisite portraits, as did Newton, who is probably best known as a commissioned portraitist. In Newton’s more personal paintings, like “Self-Portrait” (c. 1929), it is evident that she was a woman of exceptional grace, determined not to sacrifice
her femininity despite her independent mind. She was the only one of the group who married. Meadowcroft points out that while privately dedicated to their work, publicly the group accepted their secondary position as good painters … for women.

Painting Friends is academic, but Meadowcroft’s writing is never dry. It is a very readable book about how our modernist painters were determined to express a sense of Canadian identity.