PROVENANCE
Estate of the Artist, Montreal
Morris Gallery, Toronto
Peter Regenstreif, Los Angeles
By descent to a Private Collection, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Helen G. McNicoll, RBA, ARCA, Art Association of Montreal, 1925, reproduced, unpaginated
Helen McNicoll: Oil Paintings from the Estate, Part Two, Morris Gallery, 1976, titled as Mediterranean Port, reproduced, unpaginated
Natalie Luckyj, Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1999, reproduced page 8 and listed page 78
Samantha Burton, Helen McNicoll: Life & Work, Art Canada Institute, 2017, referenced page 23

EXHIBITED
Art Association of Montreal, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Helen G. McNicoll, RBA, ARCA, November – December 1925, catalogue #19
Morris Gallery, Toronto, Helen McNicoll: Oil Paintings from the Estate, Part Two, February 7 – 21, 1976, titled as Mediterranean Port, catalogue #20
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist, September 10, 1999 – January 2, 2000, catalogue #3

Paintings from the short career of Helen McNicoll, a conscientious and sincere painter, were characterized by vivid hues, luminous treatment of light, and naturalistic subjects, fusing the advances of European painting with a distinctly Canadian character. She began her study at the Art Association of Montreal, under William Brymner, who—as an enthusiastic proponent of Naturalism and Impressionism—encouraged her to paint en plein air and travel to Europe. From 1902, McNicoll left Montreal for London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, where she would be exposed to some of the most vocal English proponents of modernist painting. This was followed by a period at the Cornish School of Landscape and Sea Painting in the southeastern coastal town of St. Ives as well as a short three-month period in France.

McNicoll would settle in London, living and working with British painter Dorothea Sharp, and traveled frequently to Europe until her death in 1915. Synthesizing her influences, McNicoll developed a bright and personal approach to Impressionist painting, and frequent trips to the coastal towns of England and the continent were marked by sensitively rendered plein air paintings that resonate with lyric tonalities and hazy, romantic atmospheres.

The Rendez-vous is an exceptional example of her early work, produced in the final year of her time at the Slade, and showcases what would be a common subject of the paintings produced during her early European period. The small rural villages, seaside towns and narrow side streets she depicted proved to be fertile locations to explore the naturalistic and atmospheric qualities that preoccupied her. When compared with the immediacy and intimacy of her interiors, these townscapes are often only indistinctly populated, with the human presence pushed to the periphery. In The Rendez-vous, the background shows a promenade alive with the itinerant movements of a crowd, while the spindles of ship masts locate the scene at the harbour. Two men at the centre of the composition, standing in the crook of an arcade, give us the work’s title: their identities are kept indistinct, and we cannot tell whether this is a chance encounter or a planned meeting. The sunlit facades of the buildings are not distinct enough to place us at a specific location, but this is clearly a European setting.

The canvas expresses McNicoll at her best and highlights her precocious skill in the use of loose strokes of paint to capture light and atmosphere. Here, McNicoll abandons the subdued earth tones and moody lighting of her early genre painting (a lingering influence of the Hague and Barbizon Schools popular in Montreal in the late nineteenth century; the McNicoll family owned at least two works by Jan Weissenbruch). Instead, The Rendez-vous showcases the bright, colourful contrasts and airy, painterly strokes that would come to characterize her body of work. Sunlight streams across the top half of the painting, illuminating the promenade and the arcade pillars in a golden late-afternoon glow. Deep shade is thrown across the stone street in cool blues, cast by a building set behind the viewer—noted by the stepped roofline that zags across the canvas, directing our focus to the rendez-vous at the centre. Despite the brilliance of the lighting, the narrative remains unclear, and the subject of the meeting remains at a remove. McNicoll has captured a natural moment in time, illuminated in golden-hour hues.

During her final years, McNicoll maintained a close connection with Canada, sending paintings for the annual exhibitions at the Art Association of Montreal and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts as well as showing at the Ontario Society of Artists. The colourful palettes and distinctly carefree character of her paintings worked immensely to help popularize Impressionism in Canada, and she would receive the first Jessie Dow Prize at the 1908 AAM exhibition and the Women’s Art Society of Montreal prize in 1914. The Rendez-vous was never exhibited during McNicoll’s lifetime and remained in the artist’s collection at her death; it was first publicly shown in Canada at the 1925 memorial retrospective in Montreal.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars