111 HELEN GALLOWAY MCNICOLL HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE 21

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1 HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE HELEN GALLOWAY MCNICOLL ARCA RBA 1879 ~ 1915 The Blue Sea (On the Beach at St. Malo) oil on canvas, on verso inscribed On the Beach at St. Malo, Brittany and Helen G. McNicoll ARCA, RCA and stamped with the Studio Helen McNicoll Estate Stamp, #79, circa /4 x 24 in, 51.4 x 61 cm Estate of the Artist By descent to the present Private Collection, USA Joan Murray Artists Files, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, letter from Helen McNicoll to her father, March 19, 1913 and a copy of a photograph Joan Murray, inscription recorded from the original photograph in 1974 Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Helen G. McNicoll, RBA, ARCA, 1925, Art Association of Montreal, reproduced and listed page 7 EXHIBITED: Art Association of Montreal, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Helen G. McNicoll, RBA, ARCA, November 7 ~ December 6, 1925, catalogue #79 Continental Galleries, Montreal, label on verso Paris was the hub for Impressionism, and a thrilling city in the years following the turn of the century. Helen McNicoll, like other students of Canadian art, would have heard of the new style and particularly its way of handling light and atmosphere. She would have had her attention directed to the movement in Montreal, where she grew up, either through shows at the galleries or through her teacher in the Art Association of Montreal, William Brymner, who had studied in Paris. She would have continued to hear about the new developments in art from study, from about 1902 on, in England at the Slade School of Art at the University of London. Here her teachers would have been artists at the forefront of British modernism, who stressed a combination of academic realism and a study of bodily movement, with new interests in expression and subjectivity achieved through the use of tonal values. Studies at St. Ives in Cornwall with Algernon Talmage, from about 1905 or 1906 on, would have helped her sharpen her use of the style, with its observation of sunlight and its reflection in the shadows of the picture. Talmage told her, Remember, there is sunshine in the shadows. Around 1906, following her studies at St. Ives, McNicoll found a painting companion in the person of painter Dorothea Sharp, an exhibitor and later a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and vice~president of the Society of Women Artists. The two painted together in Brittany, Grez~sur~Loing and Italy, often using the same model, as well as sharing a studio in London. Their efforts also had common aims and subjects. In 1913, McNicoll, like Sharp, was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists. On her election, McNicoll wrote her father that the older members didn t like my things. One old man was very angry and said If that picture is right, then the National Gallery is all wrong. McNicoll s bold, summary handling would have been the quality that irked the older members of the Royal Society of British Artists. They would have likely appreciated her subject matter ~ it was primarily female. Her focus on children, women, workers, family and friends, usually involved in the incidents of everyday life, was, with her powerful style, the keynote of her artistic voice. Through such images, she championed the new woman and her health, strength and independence, but only in a reticent way. Today, the work of McNicoll is celebrated for the naturalness and charm of its imagery, often of figures in sunlight moving with unconcerned grace. Taking an elevated view of landscape, she told the viewer through her paintings that she was in control of her subject and the pictorial space she invented. She also told the viewer, though modestly, that her experience of the places she visited and in which she painted was authentic, and not the result of tourism, but in her own way, a vision of a person who actually lived in the place. The Blue Sea (On the Beach at St. Malo) is one of the works in her sunny mode. Although McNicoll stressed the distance between the artist and subject, painting the sand in the foreground with its rich tones of orange, gold, cream and ultramarine blue, the viewer feels close to the subject, almost as though he or she is also on the beach ~ and has become, like McNicoll, a happy visitor. In line with her way of conveying a feeling of an authentic place is McNicoll s assertion of a feeling of solitude and privacy. Like the strolling woman and child and the group in the distance, all of whom are absorbed in looking at the sea, the viewer feels at peace. The figure of the child in the straw hat recalls a child with blond hair and a white pinafore painted by both McNicoll and Sharp. She, or a youngster like her, appears in photographs of the two artists which each took of the other. In the photograph of McNicoll, she is shown fixing the child s hair. On the verso of the original photograph, McNicoll wrote, It s so hot that I ve put a handkerchief round my neck. It s about 90 in the shade (in the photograph, she wears a handkerchief). Perhaps, we may believe, it was the heat that drove McNicoll to the beach to paint this radiant moment. We thank Joan Murray for contributing the above essay. ESTIMATE: $125,000 ~ 175,000

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3 HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE FRANKLIN CARMICHAEL CSPWC G7 OSA RCA 1890 ~ 1945 Autumn Afternoon oil on board, signed and dated 1922 and on verso signed and inscribed Lansing, Ontario under the signature and titled in graphite 9 3/4 x 11 7/8 in, 24.8 x 30.2 cm Art Institute of Ontario, 1952 A gift to Paul Bennett, Director of the Art Institute of Ontario, in 1968 Joan Bennett, Ontario Private Collection, Ontario, circa 1970 EXHIBITED: Art Institute of Ontario, Group of Seven, 1952, catalogue #5 In 1915, Franklin Carmichael married his sweetheart Ada Went, and began working for Rous & Mann Ltd. as an illustrator. By 1920, the Carmichaels could afford to buy a home, and they purchased a small, newly built bungalow in the quaint village of Lansing. Lansing was near the forested Don River Valley, where the Carmichaels picnicked in the summer and skied in the winter. This tapestry of a sketch comes from 1922, when Carmichael had been living in Lansing and exhibiting with the Group of Seven for two years, and while he was venturing north with the Group on their sketching sojourns Autumn Afternoon is an energetic tapestry of fall colour, wherein greens, oranges, reds and yellows seem to crackle with the ripeness of fall. Carmichael s assured hand and quick sketching methods are supported by his abilities as an illustrator, his excellent sense of composition and his ability to organize pattern and form. According to the label on the back of this work, it was given to Paul Bennett, Director of the Art Institute of Ontario, upon the Institute s amalgamation with the Art Gallery of Ontario in The Art Institute of Ontario had been formed by the Education Department of the Province of Ontario in 1951 to circulate exhibitions, organize lectures and provide art instruction in the province. The Art Gallery of Hamilton, The Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario), Hart House, the London Public Library and Art Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, the Ontario Association of Architects, the Ontario Society of Artists, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Willistead Library and Art Gallery, and the Windsor Art Association were all among its founding members. This fine panel was included in an exhibition organized by the Institute in ESTIMATE: $125,000 ~ 175,000

HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE 24 113 JAMES EDWARD HERVEY (J.E.H.) MACDONALD ALC CGP G7 OSA RCA 1873 ~ 1932 Woodpile in Baker s Bush oil on board, initialed and dated 1924 and on verso signed,

4 HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE JAMES EDWARD HERVEY (J.E.H.) MACDONALD ALC CGP G7 OSA RCA 1873 ~ 1932 Woodpile in Baker s Bush oil on board, initialed and dated 1924 and on verso signed, inscribed by Thoreau MacDonald Woodpile in Baker s Bush, 3rd Concession Vaughan Twp, just south of Church and monogrammed JM 8 x 10 in, 20.3 x 25.4 cm Private Collection, Ontario J.E.H. MacDonald, Poetry and Painting, Unpublished lecture notes, Arts and Letters Club, October 10, 1929, National Archives of Canada, 30D 111 Volume A picture is not the reflection of a thing seen, but a compound of feelings aroused in the artist by the thing seen, resulting according to his power, in a more concentrated impression than the natural objects can give. J.E.H. MacDonald s sketching methods are pleasantly reflective of his personality. He was a sensitive man ~ quiet, dedicated to his work and a solitude~seeker. When faced with a grand scene, he would often choose small details in a vast panorama as his subject, rather than the whole vista. He found these details, such as partial views of lakes, high mountain glades or segments of a garden, very appealing. Thus we have sketches such as Woodpile in Baker s Bush, in which a simple woodpile stands between a distant forest and the foreground forest floor littered with the traces of woodcutting. It is an honest scene, with the woodpile neatly stacked as evidence of hard work, captured with MacDonald s short, decisive paint~strokes. It is a scene that would have greatly appealed to MacDonald s sensibilities. ESTIMATE: $25,000 ~ 35,000

HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE 25 114 JAMES WILSON MORRICE CAC RCA 1865 ~ 1924 Café ~ Paris oil on panel, on verso titled in graphite, inscribed Collection, 1934, Andre Bieler and stamped Studio J.W. Morrice 5 1/4 x 6 3/4 in, 13.

5 HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE JAMES WILSON MORRICE CAC RCA 1865 ~ 1924 Café ~ Paris oil on panel, on verso titled in graphite, inscribed Collection, 1934, Andre Bieler and stamped Studio J.W. Morrice 5 1/4 x 6 3/4 in, 13.3 x 17.1 cm Estate of the Artist; Andre Bieler, Montreal, 1934; Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal; Private Collection, Vancouver Island Nicole Cloutier, James Wilson Morrice 1865 ~ 1924, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1986, essay by John O Brian, page 90 Charles C. Hill, Morrice: A Gift to the Nation, National Gallery of Canada, 1992, page James Wilson Morrice is universally regarded as a pivotal figure in Canadian art, and his influence on later Canadian art and artists cannot be underestimated. An admirer of Morrice, fellow Canadian artist Andre Bieler once had Café ~ Paris in his own collection. As a young artist Morrice moved to Paris, and John O Brian states that Morrice s love of Paris [is] closely bound up with the qualities and characteristics of his art. Like many artists of his generation, Morrice rejected the classical mythologies and historical narratives of academic art for the pleasures and activity of contemporary Parisian life. Café ~ Paris is an example of Morrice s use of small, transportable wooden panels called pochades employed to execute oil sketches of urban subjects. Morrice tended to leave part of the panel visible and thus the wood becomes a tonal element juxtaposed with the subtle colour effects. Despite the pochade s modest scale, Morrice s affectionate feeling for street life is fully manifested within Café ~ Paris and shows the artist at his most accomplished. ESTIMATE: $20,000 ~ 25,000

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HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE 27 115 HELEN GALLOWAY MCNICOLL ARCA RBA 1879 ~ 1915 By the River oil on canvas, on verso titled and stamped twice with the Studio Helen McNicoll Estate Stamp, catalogue

7 HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE HELEN GALLOWAY MCNICOLL ARCA RBA 1879 ~ 1915 By the River oil on canvas, on verso titled and stamped twice with the Studio Helen McNicoll Estate Stamp, catalogue #76 30 x 25 in, 76.2 x 63.5 cm Estate of the Artist By descent to the present Private Collection, USA William R. Watson, Artists of High Order, Montreal Gazette, March 10, 1911 W.R., Round the Galleries: The Royal Society of British Artists, London Sunday Times, November 2, 1913 Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Helen G. McNicoll, RBA, ARCA, Art Association of Montreal, 1925, listed page 7 EXHIBITED: Art Association of Montreal, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Helen G. McNicoll, RBA, ARCA, November 7 ~ December 6, 1925, catalogue #76 Helen McNicoll was doing the right thing for an emerging artist: returning to square one to plot a development. This painting of a riverside scene reveals her ongoing ambition to bring together light, atmosphere and a tranquil scene with considerable power of handling. McNicoll was trying to wedge Impressionism into the equation, making works in brilliant colours where small patches distributed on the canvas created an all~over pattern that combined in the viewer s eye into a whole, taken at a distance. Here she is painting in her impassioned way, freshly and spontaneously, while meditating on the new values in art which she had learned and in which she believed. The subject ~ reflections ~ is one which she used often at an early date, and we notice the way the trees are reflected in the water. Here the shoreline seems to be full of activity, a sign that may indicate a later date, as does the brilliance of the handling of colour and light. One of McNicoll s paintings was described by a critic writing for the London Sunday Times in 1913 as convincing, but not over~emphasized, and the same delicacy of handling can be ascribed to this painting. Her work disarmed all thoughts of labour in the studio and thus achieved the distinctive height of art concealing art, to paraphrase the Montreal art dealer and critic William R. Watson who, in his comprehensive review of the 1911 Art Association of Montreal spring exhibition, singled out McNicoll for special mention in the Montreal Gazette. Like many other artists of her generation, she sought a simpler and more direct experience of nature, but her gift was to attractively fuse the naturalism of earlier styles with more advanced impressionism. As she realized, the tension between the two modes kept things interesting. We thank Joan Murray for contributing the above essay. ESTIMATE: $125,000 ~ 175, HENRIETTA MABEL MAY ARCA BCSA BHHG CGP 1877 ~ Portrait of the Artist s Sister oil on canvas, circa /4 x 26 in, 76.8 x 66 cm Estate of the Artist Private Collection, Vancouver When Mabel May returned to Montreal from Europe in 1913, she rented a studio but continued to live with her parents and her sister Lillian. In the summer, she painted and played golf with Lillian at Hudson Heights. In 1950, Mabel and Lillian moved to Vancouver where their sister Queenie White lived. As Lillian spent much time with Mabel, it is possible that she is the sister represented in this work. ESTIMATE: $6,000 ~ 8,000

HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE 28 117 LAURA ADELAINE LYALL MUNTZ ARCA OSA 1860 ~ 1930 Reflections of Beauty oil on canvas, on verso titled and inscribed by Laura Muntz OSA, circa 1912 ~ 1914 35 x 27

8 HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE LAURA ADELAINE LYALL MUNTZ ARCA OSA 1860 ~ 1930 Reflections of Beauty oil on canvas, on verso titled and inscribed by Laura Muntz OSA, circa 1912 ~ x 27 1/2 in, 88.9 x 69.8 cm Private Collection, Toronto Letter from Elizabeth Muntz to Marie Douglas, April 9, 1964, Private Collection The title of Laura Muntz s painting, Reflections of Beauty, has an elegiac ring to it, signaling that Muntz was sorting through memories as she created the work. The model, if we can apply the term to the young woman holding the mirror, was her niece, Elizabeth Muntz (1894 ~ 1977), 117 later a sculptor in England. Elizabeth was one of Laura s favourite subjects, and she used her features often in her work, depicting Elizabeth in various poses (many imagined) and changing the position of her body, hair style, hair colour and garments to her liking. As Elizabeth wrote later to a friend, she posed after a fashion. She wrote, I say after a fashion because so often she [Laura Muntz] would show me a picture and say, You didn t know I was painting you that day? I painted you in my head and put it out of my head onto the canvas after you had gone. In the course of making the painting, Muntz provided the viewer with a fascinating example of her appetite for contemporary developments. She had long been an admirer of Mary Cassatt, and in her own work had drawn on some of Cassatt s ideas of portraying children and women. In 1909, Cassatt had painted Woman at Her Toilette, a depiction of a seated young woman looking in a hand mirror, a popular subject of the day. Elsewhere, Cassatt had depicted women in close proximity to each other, as in A Corner of the Loge, Possibly, in Reflections of Beauty, Muntz was making an interesting point about the mutability of beauty ~ and relying on an audience who would have known and appreciated Cassatt s work. Muntz had a tendency to cherry~pick information while painting. While she drew upon her knowledge of her beautiful young niece for the face and body of the young woman looking in the mirror, she failed to finish some parts of the rest of the picture. For example, she lightly skimmed over the hand holding the fan and the figure in the background. At the same time she seriously venerated beauty, and loved to depict young women in gorgeous attire, from their hats to their dresses. The subject heralded quite a new world for her, one in which she would attempt different subjects and paint them with the same force that her work exhibited over the decade and a half she had been painting. These works sometimes transcended what had always been her mainstay ~ her juvenile genre ~ partly through their assertion of the power and interest of grown~up women, partly through their rich, muted colours and dense, painterly handling. Through the strength of subjects such as these, Muntz s paintings withstood the competition within her milieu and added to the respect in which she was held ~ hence, her inclusion in The Art Gallery of Toronto s 1926 Exhibition of Canadian Paintings along with works by Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald and Tom Thomson, among others. We thank Joan Murray for contributing the above essay. ESTIMATE: $25,000 ~ 35,000

HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE 29 118 HENRIETTA MABEL MAY ARCA BCSA BHHG CGP 1877 ~ 1971 Entrance to the Garden oil on canvas, signed, circa 1915 22 x 18 in, 55.9 x 45.

9 HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE HENRIETTA MABEL MAY ARCA BCSA BHHG CGP 1877 ~ 1971 Entrance to the Garden oil on canvas, signed, circa x 18 in, 55.9 x 45.7 cm A gift from the Artist (who was the present owner s great~aunt) to the present owner s mother By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario Paul Duval, Canadian Impressionism, 1990, page 104 Following her studies under William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal, in 1912 Mabel May journeyed to Europe, spending time in 118 France, Belgium and Holland. While traveling, May found her inspiration in the canvases of the French Impressionists. Paul Duval writes, For a decade after her return to Montreal, May s canvases exhibited a sensitive, even tender, Impressionist style, executed with a confident and relaxed technique, as demonstrated in Entrance to the Garden. This beautiful canvas depicts a mother and two girls, softly bathed in light, entering a garden. The mother s white dress gently billows in the wind, while just outside the gate another mother and daughter wait. May has captured them at the exact moment when they peer into the garden to gaze upon the flora. This delightful painting demonstrates her interest in integrating her subject into the natural environment. It was not until 1925 that May started to focus specifically on landscape painting, rather than people, under the influence of the Group of Seven. ESTIMATE: $45,000 ~ 65,000

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Mary Cassatt Impressionism

Mary Cassatt Impressionism Mary Cassatt 1844-1926 Impressionism In the vertical art storage rack you will find the following reproduction and posters: Large reproduction: Susan on a Balcony Holding a Dog (1883) Posters: The Art