PROVENANCE
Mayberry Fine Art, Toronto
Collection privée, Toronto

A native of Montreal, Henrietta Mabel May studied at the Art Association of Montreal under William Brymner and subsequently traveled in France with Emily Coonan in 1912. She was elected an associate of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1915 and in 1918 was engaged by the Canadian War Memorials to paint women’s munition work. She was an original member of the Beaver Hall Group, was invited to exhibit with the Group of Seven in 1928, 1930 and 1931, and was a charter member of the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933. The National Gallery of Canada acquired six of her canvases between 1913 and 1929.

May’s early paintings combined figure and landscape, painted with an impressionist touch of short brush-strokes in a pastel palette. In the 1920s, she principally concentrated on landscapes sketched along the Ottawa River and in the Laurentians, though she exhibited canvases of the village of Knowlton on Brome Lake in the Eastern Townships in 1922, 1925 and 1930. In the mid-twenties, her forms became more generalized, design bolder and colour more intense. This two-sided oil sketch of farmhouses in Knowlton is a superb example of May’s fluid brushwork and rich colour. The farmhouse and outbuildings by a ploughed field are enfolded by the intense green fields and hill. The rhythm moves inward towards the centre while the farmhouse with flowers swells outward to the edges, two differing interpretations of the rhythms and colours of the inhabited and natural worlds.

We thank Charles C. Hill, former curator of Canadian art from 1980 to 2014 at the National Gallery of Canada and author of The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, for contributing the above essay.

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