February 3, 2025 • 38 mins
Helen McNicoll was a Canadian painter who had a significant influence on the rise of Impressionism in that country. McNicoll, who lost her hearing in childhood, was quite successful as an artist, though her career and life were short.
Research:
- Anderson, Jocelyn. “William Brymner: Life & Work.” Art Canada Institute. https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/william-brymner/biography/
- Atanassova, Katerina. “Helen McNicoll: In Search of Light.” National Gallery of Canada. 5/4/2023. https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/your-collection/helen-mcnicoll-in-search-of-light
- Babbs, Verity. “Painting Bought for $2,700 Revealed to Be $390,000 Masterpiece.” Artnet. 10/23/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/fake-or-fortune-helen-mcnicoll-painting-2557012
- Burton, Samantha. “Helen McNicoll: Life and Work.” Art Canada Institute. https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/helen-mcnicoll/biography/
- Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. “MCNICOLL, Helen Galloway.” https://cwahi.concordia.ca/sources/artists/displayArtist.php?ID_artist=105
- Goodman, Rachel. “Renowned Canadian artist’s painting that was lost for over 100 years discovered by U.K. artist.” Now Toronto. 10/6/2024. https://nowtoronto.com/news/renowned-canadian-artists-painting-that-was-lost-for-over-100-years-discovered-by-u-k-artist/
- “Death Cuts Short Promising Career.” The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec, Canada). Mon, Jun 28, 1915. Page 5
- Haworth, Lorna Helen. “A History of McKay School for the Deaf.” Master’s Thesis. McGill University. 1960.
- Huneault, Kristina. “Impressions of difference: the painted canvases of Helen McNicoll.” Art History. April 2004.
- Luckyj, Natalie. “Helen McNicoll : a Canadian Impressionist.” Art Gallery of Ontario. 1999.
- Luckyj, Natalie. “McNICOLL, HELEN GALLOWAY,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed January 14, 2025, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mcnicoll_helen_galloway_14E.html.
- Musee National des Beaux Arts du Quebec. “Musee National des Beaux Arts du Quebec.” https://www.mnbaq.org/en/exhibition/helen-mcnicoll-1306
- Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. “Helen McNicoll. An impressionist Journey A celebration of light!.” Canadian Newswire. 6/19/2024. https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/helen-mcnicoll-an-impressionist-journey-a-celebration-of-light--811205352.html
- Nash, Julie. “Defining Moments: Mary Cassatt and Helen McNicoll in 1913.” At Herstory. 8/8/2023. https://artherstory.net/defining-moments-mary-cassatt-and-helen-mcnicoll-in-1913/
- Prakash, A.K. "Independent Spirit: Early Canadian Women Artists." Queen's Quarterly, vol. 116, no. 3, fall 2009, pp. 354+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A211717399/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=f5c4f4e2. Accessed 13 Jan. 2025.
- Widd, Thomas. “History of the Protestant Institution for Deaf-Mutes, Montreal, Canada.” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb. Vol. 22, No. 4. October 1877. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44401559
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
A name I was introduced to while working on our
most recent installment of Unearthed is Helen McNicol, who was
an Impressionist painter. The way the Unearthed episodes work, if
you haven't heard me tell the story before, is I
just I look at a ton of news and research sources.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Over the course of a quarter.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I bookmark everything that seems relevant, and then when it's
time to actually write the episode, I go through all
that pick out the ones that seem the most interesting
or fun or notable. And there are way more things
that I've bookmarked over the course of the quarter than
can possibly go into an episode, even if I expanded
it into a third part, which I don't want to
(00:59):
do for a number of reasons, one of them being
that I would need to write an entire third episode
in the same amount of time that I'm currently writing
two in most cases, But there are also a lot
of reasons why something might not go into that final cut,
like maybe it's confusing or seems really similar to something
we just talked about without really adding anything new, or
(01:22):
maybe I just can't figure out what is notable or
really interesting about it. The Helen McNicol find that came
up as I was researching our most recent Unearthed was
a rediscovered painting, and it didn't wind up in this
latest installment for two reasons. One was that the story
(01:42):
came from a BBC TV show called Fake or Fortune,
which is about art authentication. I tried not to put
too much stuff from TV shows on Unearthed, especially TV
shows that sort of have a whole focus on unearthing
things like I think we've had one thing that was
from Antique's Road Show on Unearthed ever, and that was
(02:05):
because it was one of the Bronte Sisters hair. The
other reason, though, was I immediately just wanted to do
a whole episode on Helen McNichol.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
So here it is. Helen Galloway mcnicholl was born in Toronto, Ontario,
on December fourteenth, eighteen seventy nine. She was the first
child born to David and Emily Patchley mcnicholl. David had
been born in Scotland and Emily had been born in England,
and they immigrated to Canada before Helen was born. When
(02:36):
Helen was still very young, the family moved from Toronto
to Montreal, Quebec, and that's where her six siblings were born,
three brothers and three sisters.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
David's career was in railroads, starting back when he was
still living in the UK. After arriving in Canada, he
worked for a couple of different railroad lines before being
hired at Canadian Pacific Railway, where he spent the rest
of his career. He worked his way up through the
ranks there, and so the family became increasingly prosperous and
(03:08):
prominent over the course of Helen's early life. By the
time she was in her early twenties, her father had
become a vice president and had commissioned the building of
a large house that they called Brayley and had five
bedrooms and two servants rooms. A nineteen sixteen obituary described
him as one of the best known railway men in
(03:30):
North America.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
It's likely that Helen's exposure to art started at an
early age. David and Emily were both interested in art.
Emily painted china and she was also a poet, and
David sketched and painted and also built up an art collection,
and art was probably also part of Helen's early education,
which happened at home. She contracted scarlet fever and became
(03:55):
deaf when she was still a toddler, and she was
tutored at home rather than being sent to school.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
We don't really have very much detail about Helen's early life,
or about her hearing loss and how it might have
affected her sense of herself for her relationship to the world.
The sources used in today's episode agree that she learned
to read lips and that her family and friends helped
her in situations where she needed to communicate with people
(04:22):
she didn't know. It's also really clear that she enjoyed music.
A couple of sources noted that she learned to play
the piano, and we also know that the family traveled.
Helen's first trip abroad was when she was five, when
she and her oldest younger siblings made a trip back
to England with their mother. Helen's first formal instruction in
(04:45):
art was at the Art Association of Montreal, which had
been founded in eighteen sixty. Her education there included things
like nude figure studies, copying the works of great masters,
and creating drawings of plaster copies of Fami statues. McNichol
got a scholarship for these drawings in eighteen ninety nine.
(05:06):
Helen's teachers at the Art Association included William Bremner, who
served as director of the Association for more than thirty years.
Although he'd been really reluctant about taking on this role
when he first accepted that job ten years earlier. It
was one of those things where he really wanted to
focus on his own arts, but his paintings weren't selling
(05:28):
and he needed the income.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
In terms of his art, Bremner is probably most known
for his landscapes, but he also played a huge role
in the development of Canadian art. Overall, the British colonies
of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the province of Canada
had become one nation in eighteen sixty seven, so the
Dominion of Canada was only about twenty years old when
(05:51):
he started teaching, and he played a deeply influential role
in the education of a whole generation of Canadian artists.
He sometimes called the father of Canadian painting.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Also in eighteen ninety nine, McNichols sketched some students at
a school for the deaf. So we're going to take
a moment to talk about education for deaf children in
Quebec in the late nineteenth century. This school was described
as the Oral School, and most of the sources used
in this episode conclude that it was the Mackay Institution
(06:27):
for Protestant deaf, mutes and the Blind in Montreal that
had been founded in eighteen sixty nine. At that time,
for the most part, there were separate educational and social
institutions for Catholics and Protestants in Quebec. Catholics were also
more likely to speak French, while Protestants were more likely
(06:47):
to speak English. The Roman Catholic Church had already established
two schools for deaf French speaking Catholic students in Quebec,
one for boys and one for girls, but the McKay
Institution was Quebec's first school for deaf children who were
Protestant and from English speaking families.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
The McKay School was named for Joseph McKay, who was
in the dry goods business and donated the land and
building for the school, but one of the people who
was really instrumental in its founding was Thomas Widd, who
was a journalist and educator who had grown up and
been educated in England, and who was himself deaf. Widd
(07:27):
became the school's principal, and his wife, Margaret, who was
also deaf, was heavily involved as well. In the earliest
years of the school, the two of them made up
most or all of the staff.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
When the McKay School was founded, the focus was on
teaching deaf children to read and write, and to fingerspell
and use other signs, along with other basic academic work,
vocational and life skills, and religious instruction. Not long after
it opened, a student was enrolled who had become deaf
after learning how to speak, and the school hired a
(08:01):
hearing teacher to both help meet that student's needs and
to teach other students how to speak.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
But then over time.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
The school's focus shifted, in part because of debates over
the best ways to teach deaf children and for deaf
people to communicate broadly. Speaking manualists advocated for sign language,
while oralists advocated for deaf people to learn to speak
and read lips. In eighteen eighty an international conference of
(08:30):
deaf educators was held in Milan, Italy. The assembled, educators
resolved that oralism was the superior method, and they banned
the teaching of sign language. These resolutions were based on
the incorrect belief that learning to sign was harmful for
children's cognitive development, and a desire among hearing educators for
(08:52):
deaf students to assimilate with the hearing world as much
as possible. In twenty ten, the twenty first International Calls
on Education of the Deaf was held in Vancouver and
denounced these resolutions and formally apologized for this ban. So
to get back to how this relates to Helen McNichol,
several sources used in this episode say that the McKay School,
(09:16):
by that point teaching the oral method was colloquially being
called the oral school, and so that's where mcnicholl sketched
these students. I'm not completely confident that's the case, though.
I looked through all kinds of documents associated with this school,
and articles and a master's thesis about the school's history,
(09:37):
news reports from Montreal from the eighteen sixties to about
nineteen hundred, and reports on schools for deaf children in
North America over those years, and I really didn't find
any references to the McKay school being called the Oral School.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
That doesn't conclusively mean it didn't happen, but a couple
of sources describe mcnichol's visiting a different school in eighteen
ninety nine, the Mystic Oral School in Connecticut. Earlier in
the nineteenth century, a man named Jonathan Whipple had developed
a method to teach his deaf son how to speak,
and decades later his grandson had established the Whipple School
(10:16):
for the Deaf. The Whipple School also included academic and
vocational training, along with a big focus on reading lips
and speaking. This school went through various changes and difficulties
before becoming Mystic Oral School in eighteen ninety eight. So
regardless of which school these students were attending when mcnicholl
(10:38):
sketched them, the fact that she was drawing students at
a school for the deaf suggests that she had connections
to the deaf community around her. We don't know exactly
what those connections were, though very few of mcnichol's letters
have survived until today, and there's really no diaries or
other personal writing of hers. News articles about her art
(11:01):
career don't reference her deafness at all, which isn't necessarily
surprising considering attitudes about deafness and disability at the time.
This is similar to what came up last year in
our episode on tennis player Charlotte Cooper Sterry. When Helen
McNichol was in her early twenties, she went abroad to
study art, and we'll get into that after we pause
(11:23):
for a sponsor break. In nineteen oh two, at the
age of twenty three, Helen mcnicholl went to London, England
to study at the Slade School of Art. There's a
bit of speculation about why she decided to go to
(11:46):
London rather than to Paris, since Paris was considered the
more prestigious and influential place for promising artists. Mcnicholl had
family connections in the UK and her father had work
connection there as well, so this might have been a factor.
There's also no mention of her speaking French and the
(12:06):
research for this episode, so it's possible that that played
a role too. She definitely visited France later on she
had a studio there, but she or her family may
have had concerns about her living somewhere that she didn't
speak the language to study art while also being deaf.
Of course, London also had a more conservative and respectable
(12:30):
reputation than Paris did, so there's also a possibility that McNichol,
or perhaps her parents, just preferred that. The Slade School
specifically is described as having a quote restrained brand of modernism.
During this era, it could still be controversial for women
to participate in art classes with nude models, but as
(12:52):
had been the case at the Art Association of Montreal,
this was allowed at the Slade School, so it was
popular among women arts students in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. About two thirds of the students there
were women.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
McNichol spent two years at the Slade School of Art,
earning first class honors. She took a trip to France
and then went to Saint Ives in Cornwall to attend
the Cornish School of Landscape and Sea Painting. Saint Ives
was a fishing town that was also home to artist colonies.
A few decades later, after World War One, Saint Ives
(13:29):
became home to a group of more abstract, avant garde artists,
and that's often what people are talking about today when
they say the Saint Ives school, but when McNichol was
there a lot of the focus was on Impressionism and
landscapes and seascapes painted enplanaire or out in the open.
One of mcnichol's teachers was British impressionist Algernon Talmage, and
(13:53):
Canadian artist Emily Carr studied there at the same time
that Helen McNichol did.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
In McNichol also met British impressionist Dorothea Sharp. Sharp had
been born in eighteen seventy three, so she was about
six years older than McNichol, and she was a little
farther along in her art career. Sharp had studied in
London and Paris, and she had exhibited work at the
Royal Academy of Arts and the Paris Salone, she was
(14:21):
able to share her knowledge and experience in both art
and the European art world with mcnicchol.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Sharp and mcnicholl were together for the rest of mcnicholl's life.
They lived together and shared studio space, mutually supported and
encouraged one another, and called each other Nelly and Dolly.
The titles of their paintings often don't say who the
model was, but many of mcnicholl's paintings. They're believed to
be of Sharp and vice versa. Sharp was also really
(14:51):
skilled at communicating and working with models, like getting them
into poses that were both realistic and evocative. There are
a lot of paintings in which Sharp and McNichol were
clearly working with the same models in the same setting.
In addition to working with their models, Sharp also made
a lot of their arrangements when they traveled together and
(15:12):
helped McNichol communicate with others at art shows and other events.
We don't really have things like diary entries, letters between
the two of them, or letters to other people in
which they.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Wrote about one another. It is clear, though, that their
relationship made their work as artists possible. It was not
appropriate for women to live and work alone, so the
fact that they were together gave them access to spaces
that they wouldn't have had otherwise. While mcnichol's family was
affluent enough that she didn't need to sell her work
to support herself, that was not the case for Sharp,
(15:48):
but they were able to share their costs on things
like supplies and accommodations. They also created an artistic world
that was really focused on women. Aside from a few
street scenes or crowd scene, their models were almost entirely
women and children, and they add connections to a number
of other women artists. Although Helen McNichol never lived in
(16:10):
Canada full time after going to London to study art,
she did visit and she sent her paintings back to
Canada for various exhibitions. Her first professional exhibition took place
when she was twenty six, at the Art Association of Montreal.
That was in February and March of nineteen oh six.
She very quickly developed a name for herself as an artist,
(16:33):
and in nineteen oh eight her painting September Evening was
awarded the Art Association of Montreal's Jesse Dow Prize, named
for the Association's governor. This was the first year this
prize had been awarded, and McNichol shared it with painter W. H. Clapp,
who had also studied with William Bremner. September Evening depicts
(16:55):
a gold field dotted with sheaves of grain, bordered by
a four. Most of the forest is shown only in shadow,
except for one tall tree that's covered in browning leaves.
There's a pair of ruts left by wheels off to
the side and barely visible. Off in the distance, there's
a shape of what looks like a woman in a
(17:16):
skirt walking away toward the woods with a small child.
Also in nineteen oh eight, she and Dorothea Sharp got
a studio in London, and later they had one in
Paris as well. They traveled frequently, doing a lot of
painting from remote villages, painting the villages themselves as well
as countrysides and seasides. McNichol became involved in the Society
(17:38):
of Women Artists, which Sharp was already a part of,
and Sharp became its vice president. In nineteen thirteen, McNichol
was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists, which
had been established in eighteen twenty three in response to
the exclusivity of the Royal Academy of Arts, which admitted
only fifty members at a time. The year she was
(17:59):
elected to the society, she also had three paintings shown
in its exhibition.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
In nineteen fourteen, McNichol was elected to the Royal Canadian
Academy of Arts. She was also awarded the Women's Art
Society Prize that year for her painting in the Shadow
of the Tent, which we'll talk more about in a
little bit. McNichol made a visit back to Canada in
April of nineteen fourteen, and after returning to Europe, she
(18:25):
and Sharp went to Saint Valericia, some on the northern
coast of France. On June twenty eighth of that year,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were
assassinated by a Bosnian Serb. Austria Hungary declared war on Serbia,
and by the start of August multiple nations.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
In Europe were at war.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
There are some surviving letters from this time and they
don't really make it sound like McNichol and Sharp thought
they were in danger at this point, but people back
home in Canada did not feel the same. David mcnicholl's
role as vice president at Canadian Pacific Railway had already
made a lot of Helen's travel possible, and at this
(19:08):
point officials with the railroad worked with their connections in
Europe to get Helen and Dorothea back to England. Both
women donated some of their artwork to help raise money
for the war effort.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Sadly, in June of the following year, Helen mcnichol's family
received a cable that she had suddenly become ill, and
then the next day a second cable saying that she
had died. She died in Swanage, Dorset, on June twenty seventh,
nineteen fifteen, at the age of thirty five. The sources
that Tracy used in this episode all agreed that she
(19:43):
died of complications from diabetes, but none of them really
mention her having diabetes prior to her death. She was
buried in Northbrook Cemetery in Swanage.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
We will talk more about her art and her influence
and legacy after another sponsor break. After Helen mcnicholl died,
her obituary in the Montreal Gazette described her as one
(20:14):
of Canada's most promising artists. It went on to say
that she was quote a conscientious and sincere painter. Despite
the temptation to which so many succumbed to pattern their
art on that of instructors, Miss McNichol went her own way,
and with each succeeding year saw advance in the work,
which she showed at the Spring exhibitions under the auspices
(20:36):
of the Art Association of Montreal and the Royal Canadian
Academy Exhibitions. This obituary described her last pictures shown in
Canada that spring as a revelation, even to people who
had kept watch on her previous pieces. This obituary also
references the changing world of art in the early twentieth century,
(20:59):
when the impression Is movement had started to take shape.
In the eighteen sixties, it had been really controversial, an
avant garde artistic movement that rejected the formal rules and
standards of the Academy de Beausire in France. Helen McNichol
was born almost twenty years after that, and by the
time she started formally studying art, Impressionism had become a
(21:20):
lot more popular and accepted within and outside of France.
Other artistic movements had become the one seen as the
avant garde. The Montreal Gazette describes her as being interested
in Impressionism only through quote attaining the ends that school
stands for the rendition of.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Light and atmosphere. While the art centers were agitated by
the Cubists and post Impressionists, the Montreal artist retained the
individuality of her style and went on improving along her
own lines, unimpressed and unaffected by the latest movements in art.
So while Impressionism wasn't novel in France anymore when McNichol
(22:01):
started her career as an artist, it was fairly new
in Canada. The first exhibition of Impressionist art in Canada
took place in eighteen ninety two, so McNichol was part
of the first generation of Canadian Impressionist painters and really
helped to popularize Impressionism in Canada and by Canadian artists.
(22:23):
She also helped connect the world of Canadian art to
the art worlds of London and Paris in terms of
her paintings themselves. That bit from the obituary about the
rendition of light and atmosphere has been echoed by multiple
writers and art critics in more recent years. Light and
its effects on her subjects are a huge part of
(22:45):
her paintings. In Fishing, painted in nineteen oh seven, two
little girls are sitting by a stream fishing with rods
made from sticks. They're under a tree with a broad trunk,
and the sunlight through the leaves dapples the surface of
the water and the grass around them, there are bright
spots of sunlight on their white dresses, a white hat
(23:06):
on the ground next to them, and a glass jar
filled with what looks like lemonade. Toward the top left
corner of the painting, there are two ducks, one white
and one brown, swimming through a brightly sunlit part of
the stream that's uninterrupted by shade.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Another example is in the Shadow of the Tent, which
is the one that earns McNichol the Women's Art Society
Prize in nineteen fourteen. Two women are at the beach
under a white tent. Outside of the tents shadow, the
sand is bathed in golden sunlight, and there are sketchy
figures of children in the far distance by the water.
(23:43):
In the shadow are two women, one in a white
dress and the other in a blue dress covered by
a bluish white jacket or smock. The one in blue
is on a stool looking through the box of art supplies,
while the one in white is on a blanket on
the ground looking at a sketchbook. The contrast between the
light and the shadow is really dramatic. The painting almost
(24:05):
feels cooler in the part that the tent is shading.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
The model's names aren't specified, but it's possible that the
woman in blue is Dorothea Sharp and that the woman
in white is Marcella Smith. Marcella Smith was also an artist,
a bit younger than Dorothea and Helen. Marcella would have
been about twenty seven when this was painted, while Helen
would have been about thirty four and Dorothea about forty.
(24:30):
Marcella was also close to Dorothea and Helen, and the
three of them often worked together. Dorothea and Marcella continued
to work and travel together after Helen died.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Another quality that often comes up in discussions of Helen
mcnichol's work is a sense of quiet or distance. It's
rare that her subjects are looking out from the canvas,
and when they are, they are rarely looking directly at
the viewer. Often they seem to be really immersed in
what they're doing or in their own interior worlds. In
(25:05):
paintings with more than one person, they often aren't interacting
with one another. Those two little girls fishing have their
eyes on their own poles. The two women under the
tent are focused on their art supplies and their sketch book.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
And not on each other.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
A few of her paintings are of spaces that are
made for people, but without any people in them, So
around table out in a cottage garden with a tablecloth
and a tea set, or a corner of a bedroom
that has a fireplace and a vanity and one's bright
streak of sunlight on the floor, but no one in there.
(25:42):
This is speculative, but a number of art critics have
interpreted this as possibly connected to mcnichol's deafness. Another source
of speculation is how to interpret mcnichol's work in terms
of gender and gender roles in the early twentieth century.
If her paintings are of women working, Like the Apple
(26:02):
Gatherer circa nineteen eleven, it shows a woman pulling a
branch of a tree toward her so she can pick
an apple from it, with her cheeks flushed in the
heat and.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Her back slightly arched. The fruit Vendor circa nineteen ten
depicts a woman sitting by her fruit stand in an alley,
resting her forearms on her knees, with a cloth awning,
providing her and her wares a little bit of shade
in a welcome breeze. Which was painted around nineteen oh nine.
A woman in a blue skirt and white top is
(26:33):
taking in the laundry from the line as it billows
in the wind. But there are also lots of women,
often dressed in white, doing things that were considered typical
and appropriate for middle class women of the era, reading
next to a child in a praym or reading alone,
or doing some kind of embroidery or needlework, or seemingly
(26:53):
just waiting while dressed for an event.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Sometimes these are interpreted as conventional paintings of women in
inventionally feminine settings, the kinds of scenes McNichol would have
had access to as a woman painter at a time
and place in which women didn't have the freedom to
just do whatever they wanted while still being seen as respectable.
But there are some critics who have interpreted some of
(27:17):
her work as more subtly subversive. One is the Chintz Sofa,
painted around nineteen thirteen. In it, a woman in a
white dress is doing some kind of needlework on a
Chintz sofa, supported by a brownish red throat pillow. The
window behind her has beige drapes, and there's a blue
vase containing some silvery foliage behind her. This could be
(27:42):
interpreted as just what it looks like, woman in a
white dress doing needlework. But that Chintz sofa is one
that was in mcnichol's London studio, and it's possible or
even likely, that the model is Dorothea Sharp. If that's
the case, then this painting is of mcnichol's partner in
both her work and her life, who was herself a
(28:03):
working artist and vice president of the Society of Women Artists.
This painting is in their shared professional working space. Maybe
it was intentional, but also maybe not. By this point,
the white dress had also become an emblem of the
suffrage movement. We have almost nothing from McNichol herself on
(28:24):
how to interpret her work or what she intended when
she painted it. As we said earlier, there aren't many
surviving letters or other writing with her own point of view.
She did keep a scrap book full of clippings, mostly
of images of women and children. Most of these images
were by other women artists, a lot of them by
(28:44):
American illustrator Jesse Wilcox Smith, who maybe needs her own episode.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
At some point. She also had a clipping of past
podcast subject Elizabeth Vige Lebrun's seventeen eighty nine self portrait
with her daughter. A couple of write ups on mcnick
describe her as focused on maternal imagery, and that's not
really true in her own work, but images of mothers
and children are very common in this scrapbook.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Helen McNichol was well known as an artist during her lifetime,
and she was prolific. When the Art Association of Montreal
had a memorial retrospective ten years after she died, it
included more than one hundred and twenty of her works.
Some of these were sort of sketches and figure studies,
but that is incredible considering that less than fifteen years
(29:35):
past between the beginning of her formal study of art
and her death. Only two of her works were acquired
by museums or galleries during her lifetime, though possibly because
she just didn't need to sell paintings to make a living.
The National Gallery of Canada acquired her painting The Stubble Fields,
which she painted around nineteen twelve and is reminiscent of
(29:57):
Claude Mooney's haystack paintings. The Saint John Art Club bought
the Farmyard, which was painted around nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
That one is.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Less detailed with thicker brushstrokes than some of her other work,
and it shows a woman in a billowing skirt standing
next to a white farmhouse with a reddish roof.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Most of Helen mcnichol's work continues to be held in
family and private collections, which is probably part of why
it took ten years to stage a memorial exhibition, but
the fact that little of it was publicly available meant
that Helen McNichol faded from prominence soon after her death
in Canada. She was also overshadowed by other later artists,
(30:39):
like the group of landscape painters known as the Group
of Seven, who came to prominence a few years after
her death. Additionally, the first histories of Impressionism in Canada
really overlooked the contributions of women artists, even though McNichol
had been one of the artists to really help popularize
Impressionism in Canada.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
That's changed a bit in more recent years, though. A
comprehensive retrospective of mcnichol's work was held at the Art
Gallery of Ontario in nineteen ninety nine. In twenty twenty three,
the Art Gallery of Ontario also hosted an exhibition called
Cassatte McNichol Impressionists Between Worlds, which featured the work of
(31:20):
both McNichol and American impressionist Mary Cassatte. It doesn't seem
like McNichol and Cassette ever actually met, but they were
contemporaries and they were compared to one another during their lifetimes.
There were also some parallels between mcnichol's life and work
and that of past podcast subject Berte Marissau, who we
covered on the show. In twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
The first retrospective of mcnichol's work to be held in
Quebec just happened. That was Helen McNichol An Impressionistic Journey,
held at the muse Nacionale des Bouzare do Quebec, and
that closed on January fifth, And about what was unearthed
last year. Mcnichol's painting The Bean Harvest had been shown
(32:03):
during her lifetime and then it had gone missing. Many
years later, British artist and art dealer David Taylor saw
a piece in an auction house that was titled in
their records as women in the fields and it was
described as in the style of Helen McNichol. He bought
this for two thousand pounds. It was an inexpensive frame
(32:26):
that seemed to date back to the nineteen sixties when
he bought it, and when he removed the frame he
saw mcnichol's signature. Experts from the BBC TV show Fake
or Fortune authenticated the painting and estimated its value as
more than three hundred thousand pounds or more than half
a million Canadian dollars. This piece was sold at auction
(32:48):
through Sotheby's in November and the buyer's identity has not
been publicized, at least not as of when we are
recording this.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
That is Helen mcmick. Do you have a bit of
listener mail. Yes, this is from Sarah. Sarah wrote in
after our most recent Unearthed with an email titled Hornbostel
Socks is my jam as is Dear Holly and Tracy.
I wanted to write after hearing your most recent Unearthed
(33:18):
episode to say thank you for highlighting the musical instrument
research taking place in Zimbabwe and South Africa. My ears
definitely tuned in when you brought up this project and
I had a good chuckle when you mentioned the Hornbostel
Socks classification system. As an organologist, someone who studies the
history and development of musical instruments, I don't often hear
(33:39):
my somewhat obscure field of study referenced in podcasts, and
very rarely does anyone mention Hornbostel Socks. I use this
classification system in my work at a musical instrument museum,
where we study how instruments develop over time and how
these developments have changed instruments sound and music overall. It
is also a helpful tool for helping to understand the
(34:03):
similarities of instruments from around the world. Although instruments may
look different or be made from different materials, they can
all be connected or grouped together through the ways they
make vibrations. We mentioned in the segment that some of
the instruments in the artworks looked to be played by
particular genders. This is another interesting part of organological research. Today,
(34:25):
we don't really think of instruments as being gendered. Even
in Western musical practice, there was a long tradition of
restricting instrument performance to one gender. Women in particular were
restricted in their musical practice with wind's instrument performance being forbidden.
Imagine the scandal of a lady blowing into an object
while guitar and keyboard instrument performance were encouraged. Obviously, I'm
(34:50):
a big musical instrument geek and I could go on
for ages. But overall, the thing I love most about
my field is how musical instruments connect people and cultures,
and that by studying instruments of the past, we can
learn not only about the music of today, but also
how people have interacted with this music across time. For
a pet tax, I've attached pictures of my big goofy
(35:12):
couch potato of a white boxer named miss Betty White.
Betty has heterochromia and we are often stopped on the
street by people commenting, oh, she has two different colored eyes.
It gives me great pleasure to look down at Betty
and respond, oh, Betty, you lost a contact Again. There's
usually a bit of confusion before they realize I am teasing,
but her mismatched eyes are always a good conversation starter.
(35:35):
The photos are for one of our recent walks through
a part in Edinburgh. There's definitely a before and after
moment in the pictures after our big white dog jumped
in a big mud puddle, one of her favorite pastimes.
Thank you again for all you do. I have a
PhD and s ym my HC and I look forward
to all your episodes. Keep up the good work, all
the best, Sarah. Thank you so much for this email, Sarah,
(35:59):
and or this very adorable set of dog pictures.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Goodness.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
I love that you have a dog named Miss Betty White.
I love that Miss Betty White has two different color eyes,
so cute.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Betty White would be very honored since she was a
big advocate for animals.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Yeah. I think there's not as strict gendering of musical
instruments today, but I do remember when I was in
you know, middle and high school, the age of taking
(36:39):
orchestra and band classes in school, there was definitely a
perception that flutes were for girls and brass instruments were
for boys.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Yeah, I would say the same.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yeah, And I don't know if that is still true
at all, because I had not been to a high
school marching band competition in many, many.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Years at this point, and it was like not strictly
adhered to.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
There were there were, you know, kids that played different instruments.
Than one might have expected based on their gender, but
it did seem like that was a kind of unwritten rule.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
So anyway, thank you again so much for this email, Sarah.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
If you would like to send us.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
A note about this or any other podcast, or at
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you want to
subscribe to our show, we're on the iHeartRadio app, and
we are anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
(37:51):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
A name I was introduced to while working on our
most recent installment of Unearthed is Helen McNicol, who was
an Impressionist painter. The way the Unearthed episodes work, if
you haven't heard me tell the story before, is I
just I look at a ton of news and research sources.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Over the course of a quarter.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I bookmark everything that seems relevant, and then when it's
time to actually write the episode, I go through all
that pick out the ones that seem the most interesting
or fun or notable. And there are way more things
that I've bookmarked over the course of the quarter than
can possibly go into an episode, even if I expanded
it into a third part, which I don't want to
(00:59):
do for a number of reasons, one of them being
that I would need to write an entire third episode
in the same amount of time that I'm currently writing
two in most cases, But there are also a lot
of reasons why something might not go into that final cut,
like maybe it's confusing or seems really similar to something
we just talked about without really adding anything new, or
(01:22):
maybe I just can't figure out what is notable or
really interesting about it. The Helen McNicol find that came
up as I was researching our most recent Unearthed was
a rediscovered painting, and it didn't wind up in this
latest installment for two reasons. One was that the story
(01:42):
came from a BBC TV show called Fake or Fortune,
which is about art authentication. I tried not to put
too much stuff from TV shows on Unearthed, especially TV
shows that sort of have a whole focus on unearthing
things like I think we've had one thing that was
from Antique's Road Show on Unearthed ever, and that was
(02:05):
because it was one of the Bronte Sisters hair. The
other reason, though, was I immediately just wanted to do
a whole episode on Helen McNichol.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
So here it is. Helen Galloway mcnicholl was born in Toronto, Ontario,
on December fourteenth, eighteen seventy nine. She was the first
child born to David and Emily Patchley mcnicholl. David had
been born in Scotland and Emily had been born in England,
and they immigrated to Canada before Helen was born. When
(02:36):
Helen was still very young, the family moved from Toronto
to Montreal, Quebec, and that's where her six siblings were born,
three brothers and three sisters.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
David's career was in railroads, starting back when he was
still living in the UK. After arriving in Canada, he
worked for a couple of different railroad lines before being
hired at Canadian Pacific Railway, where he spent the rest
of his career. He worked his way up through the
ranks there, and so the family became increasingly prosperous and
(03:08):
prominent over the course of Helen's early life. By the
time she was in her early twenties, her father had
become a vice president and had commissioned the building of
a large house that they called Brayley and had five
bedrooms and two servants rooms. A nineteen sixteen obituary described
him as one of the best known railway men in
(03:30):
North America.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
It's likely that Helen's exposure to art started at an
early age. David and Emily were both interested in art.
Emily painted china and she was also a poet, and
David sketched and painted and also built up an art collection,
and art was probably also part of Helen's early education,
which happened at home. She contracted scarlet fever and became
(03:55):
deaf when she was still a toddler, and she was
tutored at home rather than being sent to school.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
We don't really have very much detail about Helen's early life,
or about her hearing loss and how it might have
affected her sense of herself for her relationship to the world.
The sources used in today's episode agree that she learned
to read lips and that her family and friends helped
her in situations where she needed to communicate with people
(04:22):
she didn't know. It's also really clear that she enjoyed music.
A couple of sources noted that she learned to play
the piano, and we also know that the family traveled.
Helen's first trip abroad was when she was five, when
she and her oldest younger siblings made a trip back
to England with their mother. Helen's first formal instruction in
(04:45):
art was at the Art Association of Montreal, which had
been founded in eighteen sixty. Her education there included things
like nude figure studies, copying the works of great masters,
and creating drawings of plaster copies of Fami statues. McNichol
got a scholarship for these drawings in eighteen ninety nine.
(05:06):
Helen's teachers at the Art Association included William Bremner, who
served as director of the Association for more than thirty years.
Although he'd been really reluctant about taking on this role
when he first accepted that job ten years earlier. It
was one of those things where he really wanted to
focus on his own arts, but his paintings weren't selling
(05:28):
and he needed the income.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
In terms of his art, Bremner is probably most known
for his landscapes, but he also played a huge role
in the development of Canadian art. Overall, the British colonies
of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the province of Canada
had become one nation in eighteen sixty seven, so the
Dominion of Canada was only about twenty years old when
(05:51):
he started teaching, and he played a deeply influential role
in the education of a whole generation of Canadian artists.
He sometimes called the father of Canadian painting.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Also in eighteen ninety nine, McNichols sketched some students at
a school for the deaf. So we're going to take
a moment to talk about education for deaf children in
Quebec in the late nineteenth century. This school was described
as the Oral School, and most of the sources used
in this episode conclude that it was the Mackay Institution
(06:27):
for Protestant deaf, mutes and the Blind in Montreal that
had been founded in eighteen sixty nine. At that time,
for the most part, there were separate educational and social
institutions for Catholics and Protestants in Quebec. Catholics were also
more likely to speak French, while Protestants were more likely
(06:47):
to speak English. The Roman Catholic Church had already established
two schools for deaf French speaking Catholic students in Quebec,
one for boys and one for girls, but the McKay
Institution was Quebec's first school for deaf children who were
Protestant and from English speaking families.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
The McKay School was named for Joseph McKay, who was
in the dry goods business and donated the land and
building for the school, but one of the people who
was really instrumental in its founding was Thomas Widd, who
was a journalist and educator who had grown up and
been educated in England, and who was himself deaf. Widd
(07:27):
became the school's principal, and his wife, Margaret, who was
also deaf, was heavily involved as well. In the earliest
years of the school, the two of them made up
most or all of the staff.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
When the McKay School was founded, the focus was on
teaching deaf children to read and write, and to fingerspell
and use other signs, along with other basic academic work,
vocational and life skills, and religious instruction. Not long after
it opened, a student was enrolled who had become deaf
after learning how to speak, and the school hired a
(08:01):
hearing teacher to both help meet that student's needs and
to teach other students how to speak.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
But then over time.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
The school's focus shifted, in part because of debates over
the best ways to teach deaf children and for deaf
people to communicate broadly. Speaking manualists advocated for sign language,
while oralists advocated for deaf people to learn to speak
and read lips. In eighteen eighty an international conference of
(08:30):
deaf educators was held in Milan, Italy. The assembled, educators
resolved that oralism was the superior method, and they banned
the teaching of sign language. These resolutions were based on
the incorrect belief that learning to sign was harmful for
children's cognitive development, and a desire among hearing educators for
(08:52):
deaf students to assimilate with the hearing world as much
as possible. In twenty ten, the twenty first International Calls
on Education of the Deaf was held in Vancouver and
denounced these resolutions and formally apologized for this ban. So
to get back to how this relates to Helen McNichol,
several sources used in this episode say that the McKay School,
(09:16):
by that point teaching the oral method was colloquially being
called the oral school, and so that's where mcnicholl sketched
these students. I'm not completely confident that's the case, though.
I looked through all kinds of documents associated with this school,
and articles and a master's thesis about the school's history,
(09:37):
news reports from Montreal from the eighteen sixties to about
nineteen hundred, and reports on schools for deaf children in
North America over those years, and I really didn't find
any references to the McKay school being called the Oral School.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
That doesn't conclusively mean it didn't happen, but a couple
of sources describe mcnichol's visiting a different school in eighteen
ninety nine, the Mystic Oral School in Connecticut. Earlier in
the nineteenth century, a man named Jonathan Whipple had developed
a method to teach his deaf son how to speak,
and decades later his grandson had established the Whipple School
(10:16):
for the Deaf. The Whipple School also included academic and
vocational training, along with a big focus on reading lips
and speaking. This school went through various changes and difficulties
before becoming Mystic Oral School in eighteen ninety eight. So
regardless of which school these students were attending when mcnicholl
(10:38):
sketched them, the fact that she was drawing students at
a school for the deaf suggests that she had connections
to the deaf community around her. We don't know exactly
what those connections were, though very few of mcnichol's letters
have survived until today, and there's really no diaries or
other personal writing of hers. News articles about her art
(11:01):
career don't reference her deafness at all, which isn't necessarily
surprising considering attitudes about deafness and disability at the time.
This is similar to what came up last year in
our episode on tennis player Charlotte Cooper Sterry. When Helen
McNichol was in her early twenties, she went abroad to
study art, and we'll get into that after we pause
(11:23):
for a sponsor break. In nineteen oh two, at the
age of twenty three, Helen mcnicholl went to London, England
to study at the Slade School of Art. There's a
bit of speculation about why she decided to go to
(11:46):
London rather than to Paris, since Paris was considered the
more prestigious and influential place for promising artists. Mcnicholl had
family connections in the UK and her father had work
connection there as well, so this might have been a factor.
There's also no mention of her speaking French and the
(12:06):
research for this episode, so it's possible that that played
a role too. She definitely visited France later on she
had a studio there, but she or her family may
have had concerns about her living somewhere that she didn't
speak the language to study art while also being deaf.
Of course, London also had a more conservative and respectable
(12:30):
reputation than Paris did, so there's also a possibility that McNichol,
or perhaps her parents, just preferred that. The Slade School
specifically is described as having a quote restrained brand of modernism.
During this era, it could still be controversial for women
to participate in art classes with nude models, but as
(12:52):
had been the case at the Art Association of Montreal,
this was allowed at the Slade School, so it was
popular among women arts students in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. About two thirds of the students there
were women.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
McNichol spent two years at the Slade School of Art,
earning first class honors. She took a trip to France
and then went to Saint Ives in Cornwall to attend
the Cornish School of Landscape and Sea Painting. Saint Ives
was a fishing town that was also home to artist colonies.
A few decades later, after World War One, Saint Ives
(13:29):
became home to a group of more abstract, avant garde artists,
and that's often what people are talking about today when
they say the Saint Ives school, but when McNichol was
there a lot of the focus was on Impressionism and
landscapes and seascapes painted enplanaire or out in the open.
One of mcnichol's teachers was British impressionist Algernon Talmage, and
(13:53):
Canadian artist Emily Carr studied there at the same time
that Helen McNichol did.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
In McNichol also met British impressionist Dorothea Sharp. Sharp had
been born in eighteen seventy three, so she was about
six years older than McNichol, and she was a little
farther along in her art career. Sharp had studied in
London and Paris, and she had exhibited work at the
Royal Academy of Arts and the Paris Salone, she was
(14:21):
able to share her knowledge and experience in both art
and the European art world with mcnicchol.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Sharp and mcnicholl were together for the rest of mcnicholl's life.
They lived together and shared studio space, mutually supported and
encouraged one another, and called each other Nelly and Dolly.
The titles of their paintings often don't say who the
model was, but many of mcnicholl's paintings. They're believed to
be of Sharp and vice versa. Sharp was also really
(14:51):
skilled at communicating and working with models, like getting them
into poses that were both realistic and evocative. There are
a lot of paintings in which Sharp and McNichol were
clearly working with the same models in the same setting.
In addition to working with their models, Sharp also made
a lot of their arrangements when they traveled together and
(15:12):
helped McNichol communicate with others at art shows and other events.
We don't really have things like diary entries, letters between
the two of them, or letters to other people in
which they.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Wrote about one another. It is clear, though, that their
relationship made their work as artists possible. It was not
appropriate for women to live and work alone, so the
fact that they were together gave them access to spaces
that they wouldn't have had otherwise. While mcnichol's family was
affluent enough that she didn't need to sell her work
to support herself, that was not the case for Sharp,
(15:48):
but they were able to share their costs on things
like supplies and accommodations. They also created an artistic world
that was really focused on women. Aside from a few
street scenes or crowd scene, their models were almost entirely
women and children, and they add connections to a number
of other women artists. Although Helen McNichol never lived in
(16:10):
Canada full time after going to London to study art,
she did visit and she sent her paintings back to
Canada for various exhibitions. Her first professional exhibition took place
when she was twenty six, at the Art Association of Montreal.
That was in February and March of nineteen oh six.
She very quickly developed a name for herself as an artist,
(16:33):
and in nineteen oh eight her painting September Evening was
awarded the Art Association of Montreal's Jesse Dow Prize, named
for the Association's governor. This was the first year this
prize had been awarded, and McNichol shared it with painter W. H. Clapp,
who had also studied with William Bremner. September Evening depicts
(16:55):
a gold field dotted with sheaves of grain, bordered by
a four. Most of the forest is shown only in shadow,
except for one tall tree that's covered in browning leaves.
There's a pair of ruts left by wheels off to
the side and barely visible. Off in the distance, there's
a shape of what looks like a woman in a
(17:16):
skirt walking away toward the woods with a small child.
Also in nineteen oh eight, she and Dorothea Sharp got
a studio in London, and later they had one in
Paris as well. They traveled frequently, doing a lot of
painting from remote villages, painting the villages themselves as well
as countrysides and seasides. McNichol became involved in the Society
(17:38):
of Women Artists, which Sharp was already a part of,
and Sharp became its vice president. In nineteen thirteen, McNichol
was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists, which
had been established in eighteen twenty three in response to
the exclusivity of the Royal Academy of Arts, which admitted
only fifty members at a time. The year she was
(17:59):
elected to the society, she also had three paintings shown
in its exhibition.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
In nineteen fourteen, McNichol was elected to the Royal Canadian
Academy of Arts. She was also awarded the Women's Art
Society Prize that year for her painting in the Shadow
of the Tent, which we'll talk more about in a
little bit. McNichol made a visit back to Canada in
April of nineteen fourteen, and after returning to Europe, she
(18:25):
and Sharp went to Saint Valericia, some on the northern
coast of France. On June twenty eighth of that year,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were
assassinated by a Bosnian Serb. Austria Hungary declared war on Serbia,
and by the start of August multiple nations.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
In Europe were at war.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
There are some surviving letters from this time and they
don't really make it sound like McNichol and Sharp thought
they were in danger at this point, but people back
home in Canada did not feel the same. David mcnicholl's
role as vice president at Canadian Pacific Railway had already
made a lot of Helen's travel possible, and at this
(19:08):
point officials with the railroad worked with their connections in
Europe to get Helen and Dorothea back to England. Both
women donated some of their artwork to help raise money
for the war effort.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Sadly, in June of the following year, Helen mcnichol's family
received a cable that she had suddenly become ill, and
then the next day a second cable saying that she
had died. She died in Swanage, Dorset, on June twenty seventh,
nineteen fifteen, at the age of thirty five. The sources
that Tracy used in this episode all agreed that she
(19:43):
died of complications from diabetes, but none of them really
mention her having diabetes prior to her death. She was
buried in Northbrook Cemetery in Swanage.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
We will talk more about her art and her influence
and legacy after another sponsor break. After Helen mcnicholl died,
her obituary in the Montreal Gazette described her as one
(20:14):
of Canada's most promising artists. It went on to say
that she was quote a conscientious and sincere painter. Despite
the temptation to which so many succumbed to pattern their
art on that of instructors, Miss McNichol went her own way,
and with each succeeding year saw advance in the work,
which she showed at the Spring exhibitions under the auspices
(20:36):
of the Art Association of Montreal and the Royal Canadian
Academy Exhibitions. This obituary described her last pictures shown in
Canada that spring as a revelation, even to people who
had kept watch on her previous pieces. This obituary also
references the changing world of art in the early twentieth century,
(20:59):
when the impression Is movement had started to take shape.
In the eighteen sixties, it had been really controversial, an
avant garde artistic movement that rejected the formal rules and
standards of the Academy de Beausire in France. Helen McNichol
was born almost twenty years after that, and by the
time she started formally studying art, Impressionism had become a
(21:20):
lot more popular and accepted within and outside of France.
Other artistic movements had become the one seen as the
avant garde. The Montreal Gazette describes her as being interested
in Impressionism only through quote attaining the ends that school
stands for the rendition of.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Light and atmosphere. While the art centers were agitated by
the Cubists and post Impressionists, the Montreal artist retained the
individuality of her style and went on improving along her
own lines, unimpressed and unaffected by the latest movements in art.
So while Impressionism wasn't novel in France anymore when McNichol
(22:01):
started her career as an artist, it was fairly new
in Canada. The first exhibition of Impressionist art in Canada
took place in eighteen ninety two, so McNichol was part
of the first generation of Canadian Impressionist painters and really
helped to popularize Impressionism in Canada and by Canadian artists.
(22:23):
She also helped connect the world of Canadian art to
the art worlds of London and Paris in terms of
her paintings themselves. That bit from the obituary about the
rendition of light and atmosphere has been echoed by multiple
writers and art critics in more recent years. Light and
its effects on her subjects are a huge part of
(22:45):
her paintings. In Fishing, painted in nineteen oh seven, two
little girls are sitting by a stream fishing with rods
made from sticks. They're under a tree with a broad trunk,
and the sunlight through the leaves dapples the surface of
the water and the grass around them, there are bright
spots of sunlight on their white dresses, a white hat
(23:06):
on the ground next to them, and a glass jar
filled with what looks like lemonade. Toward the top left
corner of the painting, there are two ducks, one white
and one brown, swimming through a brightly sunlit part of
the stream that's uninterrupted by shade.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Another example is in the Shadow of the Tent, which
is the one that earns McNichol the Women's Art Society
Prize in nineteen fourteen. Two women are at the beach
under a white tent. Outside of the tents shadow, the
sand is bathed in golden sunlight, and there are sketchy
figures of children in the far distance by the water.
(23:43):
In the shadow are two women, one in a white
dress and the other in a blue dress covered by
a bluish white jacket or smock. The one in blue
is on a stool looking through the box of art supplies,
while the one in white is on a blanket on
the ground looking at a sketchbook. The contrast between the
light and the shadow is really dramatic. The painting almost
(24:05):
feels cooler in the part that the tent is shading.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
The model's names aren't specified, but it's possible that the
woman in blue is Dorothea Sharp and that the woman
in white is Marcella Smith. Marcella Smith was also an artist,
a bit younger than Dorothea and Helen. Marcella would have
been about twenty seven when this was painted, while Helen
would have been about thirty four and Dorothea about forty.
(24:30):
Marcella was also close to Dorothea and Helen, and the
three of them often worked together. Dorothea and Marcella continued
to work and travel together after Helen died.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Another quality that often comes up in discussions of Helen
mcnichol's work is a sense of quiet or distance. It's
rare that her subjects are looking out from the canvas,
and when they are, they are rarely looking directly at
the viewer. Often they seem to be really immersed in
what they're doing or in their own interior worlds. In
(25:05):
paintings with more than one person, they often aren't interacting
with one another. Those two little girls fishing have their
eyes on their own poles. The two women under the
tent are focused on their art supplies and their sketch book.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
And not on each other.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
A few of her paintings are of spaces that are
made for people, but without any people in them, So
around table out in a cottage garden with a tablecloth
and a tea set, or a corner of a bedroom
that has a fireplace and a vanity and one's bright
streak of sunlight on the floor, but no one in there.
(25:42):
This is speculative, but a number of art critics have
interpreted this as possibly connected to mcnichol's deafness. Another source
of speculation is how to interpret mcnichol's work in terms
of gender and gender roles in the early twentieth century.
If her paintings are of women working, Like the Apple
(26:02):
Gatherer circa nineteen eleven, it shows a woman pulling a
branch of a tree toward her so she can pick
an apple from it, with her cheeks flushed in the
heat and.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Her back slightly arched. The fruit Vendor circa nineteen ten
depicts a woman sitting by her fruit stand in an alley,
resting her forearms on her knees, with a cloth awning,
providing her and her wares a little bit of shade
in a welcome breeze. Which was painted around nineteen oh nine.
A woman in a blue skirt and white top is
(26:33):
taking in the laundry from the line as it billows
in the wind. But there are also lots of women,
often dressed in white, doing things that were considered typical
and appropriate for middle class women of the era, reading
next to a child in a praym or reading alone,
or doing some kind of embroidery or needlework, or seemingly
(26:53):
just waiting while dressed for an event.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Sometimes these are interpreted as conventional paintings of women in
inventionally feminine settings, the kinds of scenes McNichol would have
had access to as a woman painter at a time
and place in which women didn't have the freedom to
just do whatever they wanted while still being seen as respectable.
But there are some critics who have interpreted some of
(27:17):
her work as more subtly subversive. One is the Chintz Sofa,
painted around nineteen thirteen. In it, a woman in a
white dress is doing some kind of needlework on a
Chintz sofa, supported by a brownish red throat pillow. The
window behind her has beige drapes, and there's a blue
vase containing some silvery foliage behind her. This could be
(27:42):
interpreted as just what it looks like, woman in a
white dress doing needlework. But that Chintz sofa is one
that was in mcnichol's London studio, and it's possible or
even likely, that the model is Dorothea Sharp. If that's
the case, then this painting is of mcnichol's partner in
both her work and her life, who was herself a
(28:03):
working artist and vice president of the Society of Women Artists.
This painting is in their shared professional working space. Maybe
it was intentional, but also maybe not. By this point,
the white dress had also become an emblem of the
suffrage movement. We have almost nothing from McNichol herself on
(28:24):
how to interpret her work or what she intended when
she painted it. As we said earlier, there aren't many
surviving letters or other writing with her own point of view.
She did keep a scrap book full of clippings, mostly
of images of women and children. Most of these images
were by other women artists, a lot of them by
(28:44):
American illustrator Jesse Wilcox Smith, who maybe needs her own episode.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
At some point. She also had a clipping of past
podcast subject Elizabeth Vige Lebrun's seventeen eighty nine self portrait
with her daughter. A couple of write ups on mcnick
describe her as focused on maternal imagery, and that's not
really true in her own work, but images of mothers
and children are very common in this scrapbook.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Helen McNichol was well known as an artist during her lifetime,
and she was prolific. When the Art Association of Montreal
had a memorial retrospective ten years after she died, it
included more than one hundred and twenty of her works.
Some of these were sort of sketches and figure studies,
but that is incredible considering that less than fifteen years
(29:35):
past between the beginning of her formal study of art
and her death. Only two of her works were acquired
by museums or galleries during her lifetime, though possibly because
she just didn't need to sell paintings to make a living.
The National Gallery of Canada acquired her painting The Stubble Fields,
which she painted around nineteen twelve and is reminiscent of
(29:57):
Claude Mooney's haystack paintings. The Saint John Art Club bought
the Farmyard, which was painted around nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
That one is.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Less detailed with thicker brushstrokes than some of her other work,
and it shows a woman in a billowing skirt standing
next to a white farmhouse with a reddish roof.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Most of Helen mcnichol's work continues to be held in
family and private collections, which is probably part of why
it took ten years to stage a memorial exhibition, but
the fact that little of it was publicly available meant
that Helen McNichol faded from prominence soon after her death
in Canada. She was also overshadowed by other later artists,
(30:39):
like the group of landscape painters known as the Group
of Seven, who came to prominence a few years after
her death. Additionally, the first histories of Impressionism in Canada
really overlooked the contributions of women artists, even though McNichol
had been one of the artists to really help popularize
Impressionism in Canada.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
That's changed a bit in more recent years, though. A
comprehensive retrospective of mcnichol's work was held at the Art
Gallery of Ontario in nineteen ninety nine. In twenty twenty three,
the Art Gallery of Ontario also hosted an exhibition called
Cassatte McNichol Impressionists Between Worlds, which featured the work of
(31:20):
both McNichol and American impressionist Mary Cassatte. It doesn't seem
like McNichol and Cassette ever actually met, but they were
contemporaries and they were compared to one another during their lifetimes.
There were also some parallels between mcnichol's life and work
and that of past podcast subject Berte Marissau, who we
covered on the show. In twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
The first retrospective of mcnichol's work to be held in
Quebec just happened. That was Helen McNichol An Impressionistic Journey,
held at the muse Nacionale des Bouzare do Quebec, and
that closed on January fifth, And about what was unearthed
last year. Mcnichol's painting The Bean Harvest had been shown
(32:03):
during her lifetime and then it had gone missing. Many
years later, British artist and art dealer David Taylor saw
a piece in an auction house that was titled in
their records as women in the fields and it was
described as in the style of Helen McNichol. He bought
this for two thousand pounds. It was an inexpensive frame
(32:26):
that seemed to date back to the nineteen sixties when
he bought it, and when he removed the frame he
saw mcnichol's signature. Experts from the BBC TV show Fake
or Fortune authenticated the painting and estimated its value as
more than three hundred thousand pounds or more than half
a million Canadian dollars. This piece was sold at auction
(32:48):
through Sotheby's in November and the buyer's identity has not
been publicized, at least not as of when we are
recording this.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
That is Helen mcmick. Do you have a bit of
listener mail. Yes, this is from Sarah. Sarah wrote in
after our most recent Unearthed with an email titled Hornbostel
Socks is my jam as is Dear Holly and Tracy.
I wanted to write after hearing your most recent Unearthed
(33:18):
episode to say thank you for highlighting the musical instrument
research taking place in Zimbabwe and South Africa. My ears
definitely tuned in when you brought up this project and
I had a good chuckle when you mentioned the Hornbostel
Socks classification system. As an organologist, someone who studies the
history and development of musical instruments, I don't often hear
(33:39):
my somewhat obscure field of study referenced in podcasts, and
very rarely does anyone mention Hornbostel Socks. I use this
classification system in my work at a musical instrument museum,
where we study how instruments develop over time and how
these developments have changed instruments sound and music overall. It
is also a helpful tool for helping to understand the
(34:03):
similarities of instruments from around the world. Although instruments may
look different or be made from different materials, they can
all be connected or grouped together through the ways they
make vibrations. We mentioned in the segment that some of
the instruments in the artworks looked to be played by
particular genders. This is another interesting part of organological research. Today,
(34:25):
we don't really think of instruments as being gendered. Even
in Western musical practice, there was a long tradition of
restricting instrument performance to one gender. Women in particular were
restricted in their musical practice with wind's instrument performance being forbidden.
Imagine the scandal of a lady blowing into an object
while guitar and keyboard instrument performance were encouraged. Obviously, I'm
(34:50):
a big musical instrument geek and I could go on
for ages. But overall, the thing I love most about
my field is how musical instruments connect people and cultures,
and that by studying instruments of the past, we can
learn not only about the music of today, but also
how people have interacted with this music across time. For
a pet tax, I've attached pictures of my big goofy
(35:12):
couch potato of a white boxer named miss Betty White.
Betty has heterochromia and we are often stopped on the
street by people commenting, oh, she has two different colored eyes.
It gives me great pleasure to look down at Betty
and respond, oh, Betty, you lost a contact Again. There's
usually a bit of confusion before they realize I am teasing,
but her mismatched eyes are always a good conversation starter.
(35:35):
The photos are for one of our recent walks through
a part in Edinburgh. There's definitely a before and after
moment in the pictures after our big white dog jumped
in a big mud puddle, one of her favorite pastimes.
Thank you again for all you do. I have a
PhD and s ym my HC and I look forward
to all your episodes. Keep up the good work, all
the best, Sarah. Thank you so much for this email, Sarah,
(35:59):
and or this very adorable set of dog pictures.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Goodness.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
I love that you have a dog named Miss Betty White.
I love that Miss Betty White has two different color eyes,
so cute.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Betty White would be very honored since she was a
big advocate for animals.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Yeah. I think there's not as strict gendering of musical
instruments today, but I do remember when I was in
you know, middle and high school, the age of taking
(36:39):
orchestra and band classes in school, there was definitely a
perception that flutes were for girls and brass instruments were
for boys.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Yeah, I would say the same.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yeah, And I don't know if that is still true
at all, because I had not been to a high
school marching band competition in many, many.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Years at this point, and it was like not strictly
adhered to.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
There were there were, you know, kids that played different instruments.
Than one might have expected based on their gender, but
it did seem like that was a kind of unwritten rule.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
So anyway, thank you again so much for this email, Sarah.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
If you would like to send us.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
A note about this or any other podcast, or at
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you want to
subscribe to our show, we're on the iHeartRadio app, and
we are anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
(37:51):
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Tracy Wilson
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