PROVENANCE
Penny Perlmutter, San Francisco
Dr. Michael Weinberg, Ontario
Private Collection

Henrietta Shore was born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1880 and spent most of her life in the United States, immigrating there in 1913 and becoming an American citizen in 1920. She came from a large family and her early interest in art was encouraged by her mother. As a young artist in Canada, she studied with the Canadian Impressionist Laura Muntz Lyall.

In 1900, Shore enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, where she studied with the well-known American artists William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. There she also met fellow student Georgia O’Keeffe, who became a close friend. Both learned the tenets of modern painting and would later exhibit together, with Shore at times eclipsing O’Keeffe in recognition. Beginning in 1914, Shore participated in international group exhibitions, winning a silver medal at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. Exhibitions in Paris, London and Liverpool followed, and Shore was included in four shows at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science & Art (now LACMA) between 1914 and 1927.

By the 1920s, Shore had become well known for her semi-abstract modern paintings originating in the landscape, focusing on rhythm, line and reduction of form. At her solo show at the Fine Arts Gallery, San Diego (now San Diego Art Museum) in 1928, director Reginald Poland described her as one of the most important living painters in the country. Comparing the abstract works of O’Keeffe and Shore, the New York art critic Henry Tyrell declared, “There is something profoundly moving, strangely suggestive of the mystic source of our being and of creation’s dawn.… They have in common a certain eager freshness which would seem to mark them as debutants or disciples in a new and fascinating field of aesthetic discovery.”[1]

Shore also became a key figure in the California Scene Painting movement, also known as Southern California Regionalism, which was influential from the 1920s to the 1960s and focused on California landscapes and figures. In 1930, Shore joined the Mount Carmel artist colony. She was a friend and companion of photographer Edward Weston throughout the late 1920s; her interest in shells and landscapes influenced his own work, as evidenced in Nautilus, one of his most famous images. Shore is considered a pioneer in modern painting; she has been compared to Arthur Dove and fellow Canadian Lawren Harris, who likewise expressed metaphysical themes through a study of theosophy. At the height of her career, Shore was nationally known and was widely admired as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. Major solo retrospectives were mounted at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (1931) and M.H. de Young Memorial Museum (1933).

She was also a muralist, influenced by her later years in Mexico and invited by the WPA through the Treasury Relief Project to paint six murals in post offices (1936 – 1937). Her art is receiving renewed recognition and attention and is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Oakland Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

The luminous Portrait of a Young Girl, completed in 1912, shows her early promise in its composition, brushwork and wide tonal variation. In the visage of the young girl that emerges as though glowing from celestial ultramarine brushwork, wearing a black veiled hat, Shore evinces the romanticism of Muntz Lyall’s early influence. The wide gestural and chromatic range of her teachers Chase and Henri is also evident in the emotionally compelling expression of the sitter and Shore’s brilliant colour choices. Portrait of a Young Girl was completed the same year that Shore left New York for London, where she studied at the Heatherley School of Fine Art and later in the Netherlands, poised at the beginning of an international career.

We thank Lisa Baldissera for contributing the above essay. Baldissera has worked in curatorial roles in public art galleries in Western Canada since 1999 and is currently the director of Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver, BC. She completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2021.

1. Quoted in Henrietta Shore: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1900–1963, ed. Robert Aiken et al. (Monterey, CA: Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, 1986), 19.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars