Brockville’s 20th Century Women Artists

In the 1890s she traveled to New York to continue her education under American artists Kenyon Cox and Arthur Wesley Dow, and then in London under Frank Brangwyn. Around 1900 she went to Paris, where she studied under Alcide Le Beau and Charles Guérin. She stayed in Paris until 1914. Between 1914 and 1918 she lived and worked at an artist colony in Newlyn Cornwall, England.

Buell returned to Canada around 1920 and settled in Toronto where she became a leading member of the Women’s Art Association of Canada.

In 1927, acting for the Women’s Art Association, Buell accompanied Emily Carr, an artist from Victoria, British Columbia, on her first visit to Toronto. Carr wrote in her journal that Buell introduced her to her own friends, among them, members of the Group of Seven: A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, and J. E. H. MacDonald.

Buell divided her time between Brockville and Toronto. She passed away in 1938 and was buried with her family in Brockville’s Oakland Cemetery.

Efa Prudence Heward was born in Montreal on July 2nd, 1896; she was the sixth of eight children born to Sarah Efa Jones and Arthur R.G. Heward. Her father was a Canadian Pacific Railway official in Montreal and her mother was from a prominent United Empire Loyalist family that had settled in the Brockville area in the late 1700s. The family owned a cottage at Fernbank, just west of Brockville, where Heward would return frequently to host sketching trips (which were later referred to as “painting picnics” by A.Y. Jackson) with her friends and colleagues.

Heward took her first drawing lesson at the age of twelve and soon started painting at the Art Association of Montreal (later the Montreal Museum of Fine Art). Her studies there were interrupted by the First World War.

After the War, Heward enrolled again at the Art Association of Montreal, studying under William Brymner and Randolph Hewton. It was here that she met Edwin Holgate, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage and others who, together with Heward, would form the Beaver Hall Group of Painters.

In 1925, Heward travelled to France to study art at the Académie Colarossi under Charles Guérin. She also studied drawing at the École des beaux-arts under Bernard Naudin.

Throughout the 1930s, Heward was an active member of a variety of artists groups. She joined the executive committee of The Atelier in 1931; was co-founder and vice-president of the Canadian Group of Painters (1933—1939); and was a founding member of Montreal’s Contemporary Arts Society (1939-1944).

She is most recognized for her sculptural forms, defiant female subjects, and expressionistic colours.

She died in 1947 due to complications from asthma.

(Artwork on loan from the family of the artist)

Ruth Mary Eliot was born in 1913. Her mother, Mary was born in Somerset, Bermuda and was married to Colonel C. A. Eliot there in 1910; they moved to Ottawa in 1911. Although they lived in Ottawa, the family had a cottage at Fernbank, just west of Brockville. There, the Eliots were neighbours to the Hewards, including artist Prudence Heward, whose professional circle include the Beaver Hall Group of Painters in Montreal, and the Group of Seven in Toronto.

Ruth was often included in Heward’s “painting picnics” alongside prominent artists A.Y. Jackson, Sarah Robertson and others. In 1931 Ruth (only 19 at the time) exhibited with the Group of Seven at the Art Gallery of Toronto.

In addition to the 1931 show with the Group of Seven, Ruth exhibited with the Canadian Group of Painters and with the Art Association of Montreal. Ruth died in Ottawa in 2002.

Marjorie Winslow (nee Stevenson) was born in Montreal in 1907. She studied in Montreal at the Art Association of Montreal (later the Museum of Fine Arts) and L’École des Beaux Arts, as well as at the Academie du Feu in Paris, the British Academy in Rome, and the Slade School in London.

She married Kenelm Winslow and had two children. They lived in Kingston between 1939 and 1946, before moving back to Montreal. While in Kingston, Winslow helped with art classes at Queen’s University.

Between 1941 and 1946, Winslow worked for Dr. Edwin Robertson, Head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Queen’s University to create wax model teaching aids depicting female reproductive organs, the birthing process, and the ways different diseases and pathological conditions affect these. Due to the War, no such teaching aids were otherwise available. Winslow learned some techniques from an artist brought from Johns Hopkins University (Maryland, USA) by Dr. Robertson, but much was accomplished through experimentation – Winslow had never worked with wax before. She would attend operations at Kingston General Hospital alongside Dr. Robertson, reproducing what she had seen there from memory and working with Dr. Robertson to get the proportions and colours correct.

She later moved back to Montreal and worked as an artist with well-known neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield to produce life-sized clay models to illustrate surgical procedures.

Winslow and her husband moved to Brockville in the late 1960s where she continued to create and exhibit her works. They lived in Robertson House on Broad St. She died in Brockville in 1998.

Note: Visit the Health Care Museum in Kingston to view the 128 surviving Dr. Edwin Roberston moulages (wax models). At the time of their donation in 1996, the identity of the artist was a mystery. Through thorough research, the Health Care Museum was able to confidently attribute the work to Marjorie Winslow. An interview with Winslow that same year confirmed the museum’s research.

Joan Gilmour was born in Brockville in 1925. Her father Alan Gilmour’s family had operated Gilmour Wholesale in Brockville (c1870s-c1950s). She grew up on Heartly St. and become very involved with sailing. She helped establish the sailing division of the Brockville Yacht Club in 1945 and in 1948 she became commodore of the club, the first female commodore in North American yachting.

She graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1950. That same year she married John Carlyle Gandier of Montreal.

She went on to study at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (formerly the Art Association of Montreal) and at the Ringling School of Art and Fine Arts Institute at New College in Florida. Her abstract works have hung in numerous juried shows and individual exhibitions in Toronto, Florida, New York City, Montreal and Brockville.

She and her husband moved back to the Brockville area in 1970. Here, she continued to share her love of sailing and art with Brockville’s youth.

She passed away in 2002 and was buried with her family in Brockville’s Oakland Cemetery.

Ruth Noreen Mallory was born in Brockville in 1928. She was deeply influenced by her experiences sailing on the river and, later, boating and swimming at the family cottage on Charleston Lake. Her father, Brockville dentist Dwight Mallory, was a photographer, and her mother Jeanne Mallory was a painter. She was also related to Brockville artist Robert Wright, who for some time lived in an apartment in the house she grew up in at 17 Sherwood Street (the Mary Ann and Robert Wright House).

Mallory graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1952, later working in the design departments of CBC Television and the Stratford Festival. In 1961, she settled in Montreal with her husband, novelist Hugh Hood, where she studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and Concordia University. The couple raised four children.

Over her lifetime she showed her work in solo and group exhibitions annually for more than 50 years in Montreal, Toronto, Brockville, Fredericton (N.B.), Halifax (N.S.) and Cleveland (OH), among other locations. She taught privately and through Montreal’s Saidye Bronfman Centre and St. Lawrence College in Brockville. She created one of the murals in Athens, Ontario, depicting a day on the lake around 1900, and in 1982 she designed the official poster for the Brockville Sesquicentennial.

She died in Toronto at the age of 94 in 2023.