Lot 111: Helen Galloway McNicoll 1879 - 1915 Canadian oil

Helen Galloway McNicoll 1879 - 1915 Canadian oil on canvas The Blue Sea (On the Beach at St. Malo) 20 1/4 x 24 inches 51.4 x 61 centimeters on verso inscribed ""On the Beach at St. Malo, Brittany"" and ""Helen G. McNicoll ARCA, RCA"" and stamped with the Studio Helen McNicoll Estate Stamp, #79 Literature:Joan Murray Artists' Files, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, letter from Helen McNicoll to her father, March 19, 1913 and a copy of a photograph Joan Murray, inscription recorded from the original photograph in 1974 Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Helen G. McNicoll, RBA, ARCA, 1925, The Art Association of Montreal, reproduced and listed page 7 Provenance:Estate of the Artist By descent to the present Private Collection, USA Exhibited:The Art Association of Montreal, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Helen G. McNicoll, RBA, ARCA, November 7 - December 6, 1925, catalogue #79 Continental Galleries, Montreal, label on verso Paris was the hub for Impressionism, and a thrilling city in the years following the turn of the century. Helen McNicoll, like other students of Canadian art, would have heard of the new style and particularly its way of handling light and atmosphere. She would have had her attention directed to the movement in Montreal, where she grew up, either through shows at the galleries or through her teacher in the Art Association of Montreal, William Brymner, who had studied in Paris. She would have continued to hear about the new developments in art from study, from about 1902 on, in England at the Slade School of Art at the University of London. Here her teachers would have been artists at the forefront of British modernism, who stressed a combination of academic realism and a study of bodily movement, with new interests in expression and subjectivity achieved through the use of tonal values. Studies at St. Ives in Cornwall with Algernon Talmage, from about 1905 or 1906 on, would have helped her sharpen her use of the style, with its observation of sunlight and its reflection in the shadows of the picture. Talmage told her, ""Remember, there is sunshine in the shadows."" Around 1906, following her studies at St. Ives, McNicoll found a painting companion in the person of painter Dorothea Sharp, an exhibitor and later a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and Vice President of the Society of Women Artists. The two painted together in Brittany, Grez-sur-Loing and Italy, often using the same model, as well as sharing a studio in London. Their efforts also had common aims and subjects. In 1913, McNicoll, like Sharp, was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists. On her election, McNicoll wrote her father that ""the older members.....didn't like my things. One old man was very angry and said 'If that picture is right, then the National Gallery is all wrong.'"" McNicoll's bold, summary handling would have been the quality that irked the older members of the Royal Society of British Artists. They would have likely appreciated her subject matter - it was primarily female. Her focus on children, women, workers, family and friends, usually involved in the incidents of everyday life, was, with her powerful style, the keynote of her artistic voice. Through such images, she championed the new Woman and her health, strength and independence, but only in a reticent way. Today, the work of McNicoll is celebrated for the naturalness and charm of its imagery, often of figures in sunlight moving with unconcerned grace. Taking an elevated view of landscape, she told the viewer through her paintings that she was in control of her subject and the pictorial space she invented. She also told the viewer, though modestly, that her experience of the places she visited and in which she painted was authentic, and not the result of tourism, but in her own way, a vision of a person who actually lived in the place. The Blue Sea (On the Beach at St. Malo) is one of the works in her sunny mode. Although McNicoll stressed the distance between the artist and subject, painting the sand in the foreground with its rich tones of orange, gold, cream and ultramarine blue, the viewer feels close to the subject, almost as though he or she is also on the beach - and has become, like McNicoll, a happy visitor. In line with her way of conveying a feeling of an authentic place is McNicoll's assertion of a feeling of solitude and privacy. Like the strolling woman and child and the group in the distance, all of whom are absorbed in looking at the sea, the viewer feels at peace. The figure of the child in the straw hat recalls a child with blond hair and a white pinafore painted by both McNicoll and Sharp. She, or a youngster like her, appears in photographs of the two artists which each took of the other. In the photograph of McNicoll, she is shown fixing the child's hair. On the verso of the original photograph, McNicoll wrote, ""It's so hot that I've put a handkerchief round my neck. It's about 90 in the shade"" (in the photograph, she wears a handkerchief). Perhaps, we may believe, it was the heat that drove McNicoll to the beach to paint this radiant moment. We thank Joan Murray for contributing the above essay.