Challenge to the ideal of femininity

Canadian painter Prudence Heward was an audacious post-Impressionist, and so much more.

Rollande, 1929, Prudence Heward, courtesy National Gallery of Canada.

When I first saw the painting above, I laughed aloud. I was painting badly, my nose dripping horribly. Young Rollande perfectly echoed my mood. Kudos to the aficionado who texted it to me.

Rollande’s discontent is epitomized by her pink work apron. It is the initial focus of the painting and must have been loathsome to a girl with ambition. She stands, hands on hips, separated by a fence from the Quebec farm that is her lot in life. Even her posture is confrontational. She may be staring directly at us in the Modernist mode, but hers is no happy face. It’s almost as if we are part of the problem.

Compare her face to Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1530, and you sense where Prudence Heward is heading. Bronzino’s anonymous poet can stare with unsmiling hauteur and we understand that he is the cock of the walk. But women—especially low-status women—are supposed to be cheerful.

Sisters of Rural Quebec, 1930, Prudence Heward, courtesy Art Gallery of Windsor

Rollande also modelled for Heward’s Sisters of Rural Quebec, 1930. The younger girl is her sister, Pierrette. The composition is a brilliant, complex slash of diagonal and vertical lines. It serves to further isolate the sisters, both from each other and from us. Not only are their faces stark and emotional, but note the sunflower at the bottom left corner. It’s in darkness, a mute testimony to their ‘real’ life on the farm.

Apple Tree (Study for Portrait of Ellen), c. 1935, Prudence Heward, courtesy National Gallery of Canada.

“I think that of all the arts in Canada painting shows more vitality and has a stronger Canadian feeling,” Heward wrote in 1942. At that time, Canadian painting had reached a brilliant maturity, separate from its American and British siblings. It was uniquely reflective of the country, its circumstances, its ethos and its pride.

Anna, c. 1927, Prudence Heward, courtesy National Gallery of Canada. She looks as if she's fallen in the snow.

Prudence Heward was primarily known as a figure painter, although I’ve included a few of her landscapes as well. She was not limited by traditional Québécois expectations herself. Rather, she was born in Montreal to a large, affluent family who supported her artistic inclinations.

During World War I she served with the Red Cross in England. Returning to Canada, she resumed painting, joining the modernist Beaver Hall Hill Group. Her first exposition was in 1924; her first solo show in 1932.

Farmhouse and Car, c. 1933, Prudence Heward, courtesy National Gallery of Canada.

In 1925, she went to Paris on scholarship, studying at the Académie Colarossi. Her work was profoundly influenced by the monumentality and color sensitivity of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Henri Rousseau.

In Paris, she met her lifelong friend, Isabel McLaughlin. Together, they returned to Paris in 1929 and took sketching classes at the Scandinavian Academy. Heward traveled with McLaughlin and other artist friends throughout her life. They visited the Heward summer home near Brockville on the Saint Lawrence, northern Ontario, the Laurentians and Bermuda. In 1933, Prudence Heward co-founded the Canadian Group of Painters, the successor group to the Group of Seven. 

The Immigrants, Prudence Heward, 1929, private collection, Toronto

A serious car accident in 1939 was the beginning of the end of her career. She continued to paint until 1945, when her health problems forced her to give up her brush. Primary was her worsening asthma. She was seeking treatment for it in Los Angeles when she died in 1947 at the age of fifty. It was an unfortunate, untimely loss for Canadian painting.

Hoaxes, frauds, and ancient artifacts?

An ancient Scottish Templar lies in state in eastern Massachusetts.

Who needs to go to Britain to see a knight lying in state on his coffin lid?

Yesterday I stopped to paint in the marshes of Westford, Massachusetts with my pal Bobbi Heath. This is low country with oaks, spruces and pines, and the foliage this week is a perfect blend of russets, golds and cool greens.

My husband was flying to Boston from a week potting around England with two of our kids. I’d skipped the trip for Plein Air Brandywine Valley. I’ve seen enough knights reposing on their coffin lids that I wasn’t concerned.

A rubbing of the Westford boulder. It may be slightly enhanced. Courtesy of the Clan Sinclair Association (USA)

We would paint until dusk and I’d collect Doug at the airport on the way home. Of course, that wasn’t what happened. Bobbi is still hobbling from her Lisfranc fracture. What started as a spattering mist developed into the cold, full-throated pissing of a late autumn rain. That’s pneumonia weather.

So, we did what artists love even better than painting: driving around looking at stuff we might paint sometime. And then Bobbi casually mentioned the Westford Knight. We have a fine St. George battling a dragon here in Maine, and I figured it was something like that.

The best photo I could get of the boulder on a dark and stormy night.

Instead, it was a large hunk of granite under a Plexiglas cover, with something unmistakably carved into its surface. Carbon dating it would be impossible, since that only works with organic material. But granite is hard, and it couldn’t have been carved without tempered steel implements. That makes the rock either a hoax like Piltdown man, or a genuine relic of pre-Columbian exploration in the New World.

The rock was first mentioned in print in 1873. At the time, it was attributed to Native Americans. By the middle of the twentieth century, it had been identified as a medieval knight complete with sword and shield.

A rubbing of the Westford Boat Rock. Courtesy of the Clan Sinclair Association (USA)

This was in part due to the influence of TC Lethbridge, English archaeologist, parapsychologist, explorer, and all-around crank—in short, just the sort of man we should have over to dinner. Lethbridge, while classically trained, came to believe that the archaeological establishment wouldn’t countenance any thinking outside the usual academic platitudes.

Lethbridge was consulted about the Westford carving, and he suggested that it represented a 14^th century hand-and-a-half wheel pommel sword.

Enter the Clan Sinclair Association (USA). They believe their ancestor, Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, discovered the New World around the year 1400. Sinclair apparently landed in Nova Scotia and then potted down the coast to Massachusetts, where he wandered inland.

My last evening at Plein Air Brandywine Valley. Courtesy of Bruce McMillan.

They believe that the rock commemorates a fallen member of Sinclair’s party, Sir James Gunn, a Knight Templar. Historians counter that the Order of the Knights Templar had been publicly disbanded ninety years earlier. This presents no particular historical challenge to readers of dime-store fiction. We know that Knights Templar popped up everywhere for hundreds of years after they were banned.

There’s also a matching oval-shaped boulder in Westford’s library. It has a sailing ship and an arrow carved into its surface. “Archaeological evidence indicates this was probably carved at the same time as the Westford Knight carving,” the Sinclairs wrote. There is, of course, no archaeological evidence anywhere, because of that pesky carbon-dating problem.

There are relics all over the northeast that defy categorization, including the Spirit Pond runestones found in Phippsburg, Maine. We have proof that Vikings visited the New World. Are all these old stones fakes, or are some of them real artifacts?

Monday Morning Art School: a simple exercise in composition

Diagonals keep us interested because they’re harder for us to “solve”.

The Artist's Studio in an Afternoon Fog, 1894, Winslow Homer. Courtesy of Memorial Art Gallery.

Winslow Homer’s most successful compositional motif was the long diagonal. He used it with great success from the beginning of his career right through to his mature Maine seascapes. Diagonals are particularly important in the latter, since they tie rock and sea together in a monolithic whole.

But diagonals are tricky, as I found last week. The Brandywine hillsides are lovely, but they’re not what I’m used to. They kept turning out stumpier than I wanted. Today’s exercise is designed to help us see the subtlety of the diagonal line.

The basic structure of The Artist's Studio in an Afternoon Fog, above. Use tracing paper to do this step.

Diagonals are more dramatic than vertical or horizontal lines. They draw us through the picture, tie disparate elements together, and create depth and perspective. They don’t need to be articulated; this is a good place for the lost and found edge. A diagonal can be implied by a value shift within a larger object.

Our minds like diagonals for the same reason we like space divisions like the Golden Ratio: they keep our interest because they’re harder for us to “solve”.

Experiment with different values within the painting's structure.

Today’s exercise is one you can do with a printer and tracing paper. Unfortunately, I have neither, being still on the road, so I’ve approximated it in Photoshop. First, find a suitable Homer painting, one where the diagonal drives the composition. I’ve used an old friend: The Artist's Studio in an Afternoon Fog, 1894. This painting is at home at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, where I’ve studied it many times.

Sunlight on the Coast, 1890, Winslow Homer. Courtesy Toledo Museum of Art.

You can use this painting or another. All I require is that the broad sweep of motion be on the diagonal. I’ve included a few other possibilities as well.

Next, I want you to print a copy of the painting and trace its major shapes. When you’re done, you should have something that looks approximately like the outline above.

The Fox Hunt, 1893, Winslow Homer. Courtesy Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The last step is to experiment with different value systems inside Homer’s basic structure. He was working from reality, but you have no such limit. When you’re finished with this, what do you observe about the values he used versus the ones you’ve tried?

  

If you sketched in the smaller dashes with high contrast, those passages should drive your eye as much as the big shapes do.

Painting at Winterthur

In the end, we each need only as many chairs as we have friends.

Folly, by Carol L. Douglas. 24X18

Plein Air Brandywine Valley is unusual in that the sales part is three days long. Usually, we paint at these events and then there’s a short auction or sale. Boom, we’re done and go home. This long sale period harks back to my days at art fairs, where we each had a tent and stood around wishing we’d brought our bocce kit.

But at least we don’t have to set our displays up. Tonight at seven we’ll appear at Winterthur, faces washed and the grime cleaned out from under our fingernails, to meet the public.

In case you think I was making things up, here is the Moorish tent folly and summerhouse from my painting. 

Winterthur bills itself as “an American country estate.” It’s a classic, aping the great landed estates of Europe. Primarily distinguished by its size, it has 175 rooms and 1600 acres (in its current, downsized, form). It has some fantastic specimen trees, all grown to luxurious maturity.

Whipping along its lanes in a chauffeured golf cart, I am reminded of an aphorism spuriously credited to one of the Barons Rothschild: “No garden, no matter how small, should have less than a hundred-acre woodlot.”

Home Farm, by Carol L. Douglas. This may not be the real home farm to this estate, but it's one of many that du Pont collected and preserved to create Winterthur.

Winterthur was the life’s work of Henry Francis Du Pont. His father—also a Henry—graduated first in his class from West Point and served in the Senate. His grandfather—another Henry—was head of the du Pont conglomerate during the Civil War. A steadfast supporter of Lincoln, he held pro-slavery Delaware in the Union and refused to sell gunpowder to the south. His great-grandfather was, of course, the legendary E. I. du Pont.

That family genius seemed to bypass young Henry Francis. He was a horticulturist and collector of early American furniture and decorative arts. "I know that I am stupid," he wrote his father while at school at Groton. He frequently described himself as “a farmer.” His father encouraged his interest in the breeding of Frisian cattle, thinking it more useful than buying a yacht.

I framed work on Bruce McMillan's car, since the Prius hood isn't designed to set things on and the interior was too messy.

In the absence of commercial zeal, young Henry became an expert on American furnishings and interiors, gradually turning his home into a museum of American art and antiques. Many rooms were rescued from historic structures. The collection spans two centuries, from 1640 to 1840, and also includes a preposterously large library on the subject.

Painting along the Brandywine. Photo courtesy of Bruce McMillan.

I’m always melancholy when visiting these historic homes. They’re where unimaginable wealth meets limited imagination. I’m glad Henry Francis du Pont preserved this collection of farms (especially considering the growth in Delaware in recent decades). I’m happy, too, that he salvaged these historic interiors for future generations. But, in the end, we each need only as many chairs as we have friends.

Taking risks

"Go big or go home." Maine is too far away, so I decided to paint big.

Reflections, Carol L. Douglas

Yesterday’s painting sites included an early industrial site along the Brandywine River, the Masley Glove Factory in Brandywine Village. I love old mills and raceways, so I headed there.

Although Brandywine Creek looks like a sleepy, tidal river, it drops about 160 feet from its head of navigation to this point. That was enough to create good mill raceways. To the west were the fertile grain fields of Pennsylvania; just downriver are navigable channels out to the ocean. It was a perfect place to help birth the American Industrial Revolution.

Gilpin's Mill on the Brandywine, c. 1827, attributed to Thomas Doughty. Courtesy Bryn Mawr.

By 1687, there was a grain mill on the Brandywine. In 1735, Quakers settled across the creek from Wilmington proper. By 1796, the village could grind 400,000 bushels of grain per year.

The first paper mill opened in 1787; the first cotton mill in 1795. In 1802, E.I. du Pont bought in and established his now-famous Eleutherian Mills. By 1810, he was the biggest gunpowder manufacturer in the country. E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company would become one of the world’s largest conglomerates. It’s still the largest chemical company in the world, in the form of DowDuPont.

Of course, none of this history is visible. That’s both good news and bad news. The water is clean enough to swim in, something that wouldn’t have been possible a few decades ago. But all the beautiful old mills are gone. In some cases, their footings remain as the foundations for modern condos, which line the river on the Brandywine side.

1905 postcard of the Dupont Gunpowder Mills, courtesy of University of Delaware. 

The loveliest building in our vicinity was the Masley glove factory, but it was around the bend from us, hidden by trees. Otherwise, there were platitudes: bridges and trees and the characteristic muddy bank of a mid-Atlantic river. While there was a pretty early twentieth century plant across the river, it was dwarfed by modern office buildings. I've escaped the orbit of urban skylines and won't willingly return.

So I decided to paint the glove factory's reflection in Brandywine Creek. There was no way such an absurdity would work on a small canvas, so I went large. The wind came up as I painted, so I didn’t capture exactly what I felt. 

Did it work? I don't really think so, but it was more fun and more challenging than playing it safe. I’m feeling quite a bit better this morning. I can finish—if not in style, than at least with my self-respect intact.