Vendu pour : 38 025 $

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Private Collection, Vancouver

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Maria Tippett, By a Lady: Celebrating Three Centuries of Art by Canadian Women, 1992, page 54

Mabel May was a founding member of the Beaver Hall Group in 1920, and like others in the group, she was born into a privileged family – her father was a successful real estate developer who became the mayor of Verdun. Her family subsequently moved to Montreal, enabling her to study at the Art Association of Montreal, the source of much creative ferment in the city. Along with fellow Beaver Hall artist Emily Coonan, she traveled to France, England and Holland in 1912, viewing galleries as well as painting.

After her return to Montreal, in 1914 she set up a studio on St. Catherine Street West, and spent summers painting at the family cottage in Hudson. Like Emily Carr, who returned from France around the same time, May’s horizons expanded in response to the innovations of the Post-Impressionists, and the impact of what she had seen resonated in her work. Maria Tippett wrote, “Working out of her St. Catherine Street studio in Montreal, Henrietta Mabel May demonstrated how far ahead she was of many of her Canadian contemporaries”, noting her use of Fauve colour and strong modelling in a 1917 painting entitled Indian Woman, Oka.

During World War I, May donated paintings to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts' Patriotic Fund Exhibition, and was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund to paint women in munitions factories. She was one of only four women engaged by the Fund to create an artistic record of Canada at war.

Even after the Beaver Hall Group formally dissolved in 1922, many of the women artists stayed in touch, painting and exhibiting together. In an art world dominated by men, they flourished through their spirit, talent and dedication, and recognition of their importance has grown in contemporary times. Lively and energetic, May continued to paint with her friends, principally in the Eastern Townships and Baie-Saint-Paul in the Lower St. Lawrence. After 1920, the influence of the Group of Seven can be seen in her landscapes, with May’s strength as a painter showing in her use of thick, smooth brush-strokes that define a solidity of form.

The 1930s brought change through the financial deprivations of the Depression. The May family’s fortunes were affected, so May began teaching art classes – something she had previously done in the Beaver Hall studio with fellow artist Lilias Newton. She organized sketching classes in the Eastern Townships, then in 1936 took a permanent position teaching art history at Elmwood, a private girls’ school in Ottawa. She also taught art classes at the National Gallery of Canada – the contribution of the Beaver Hall women artists to art education was considerable. May continued to actively exhibit. In 1933, she became a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters, and while in Ottawa she showed with the group Le Caveau.

Happy Valley, on the Road Near Ottawa is an outstanding canvas, its subject encompassing all the finest attributes of her oeuvre. Seen from a lofty vantage point from the top of the road, it is both an expansive panorama and an intimate portrait of the village nestled into the valley. In the cluster of houses no people are visible, but the warmth of their presence radiates. May’s use of light and colour is assured - the houses are depicted with a luminous palette of pastels such as pale peach and mint green, and the surrounding fields glow green-gold in the sun. Both the foreground and the mountains in the background are shadowed, the contrast increasing the sense of warmth in the valley. The sense of people living in harmony with their stunning natural surroundings is palpable.

The National Gallery of Canada has four of May’s paintings, amongst them two canvases - a large 1921 oil entitled In the Laurentians and a 1925 oil entitled The Village - both similar compositions to this, of a town set in a valley amid rolling hills.

There will be an exhibition of Beaver Hall artists, including the work of May, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the fall of 2015 entitled Le Groupe de Beaver Hall: Une modernité des années vingt / Beaver Hall Group: 1920s Modernity.

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