Renowned Newfoundland artists Christopher and Mary Pratt were sometimes bitter artistic rivals during their 47-year marriage. Those tensions surfaced most dramatically with their respective portraits of the teenaged model who was Christopher’s not-so-secret mistress.
The marriage is explored in-depth in a just-released book, Art and Rivalry: The Marriage of Mary and Christopher Pratt, by Carol Bishop-Gwyn, a Toronto author and journalist best known for The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca, her much-praised 2011 biography of the founder of the National Ballet of Canada.
Art and Rivalry is a great read and a vivid exploration of a complicated union, Canada’s answer to the tempestuous on-again, off-again relationship between Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Sometimes, with Art and Rivarly, one can feel like a voyeur, peering into forbidden spaces. Yet Bishop-Gwyn is never exploitative. She shows, without judgment, how the troubled marriage affected the artistic trajectory of two of the country’s most loved artists.
Mary and Christopher Pratt, 1955 (courtesy of the Pratt family)
We frequently see things from the point of view of Mary, rather than Christopher. That can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that Mary’s diaries were available to the author while Christopher blocked access to most of his personal papers.
The rivalry between the Pratts is revealed, most explicitly, in their respective artistic treatments of Donna Meaney, the Newfoundland teenager who, from age 16 and for many years later, was Christopher’s chief model and lover.
Mary was aware of the affair but never discussed it with Christopher. The dialogue, instead, was on canvas. Christopher had painted many nudes of Meaney and at one point in the late 1970s, inexplicably gave slides of the nude model to his wife. Mary then created her own series of paintings of Meaney, paintings that became part of the ongoing competition between the two Pratts.
Carol Bishop-Gwyn (photo by Derek O'Donnell)
The author quotes Mary telling art historian Tom Smart that "she wanted to discover what it was about Donna’s body that made her an erotic muse for her husband.” Bishop-Gwyn also speculates that “Mary wanted to show that she could paint the object of her husband’s desire better than her husband could.”
One of Mary’s more controversial paintings of Meaney is Girl in My Dressing Gown, 1981, showing Meaney in a garment that belonged to Mary. Christopher was not pleased. “She just visually ravaged Donna,” Bishop-Gwyn quotes Christopher as saying. “She makes Donna look wasted. Donna has on her dressing gown and Donna was my model.”
Bishop-Gwyn says Mary’s nudes were “visceral and organic, Christopher’s intellectualized and measured.” Simply put, Mary’s nude paintings of Meaney were “better” and “truer to life” than Christopher’s. The critics generally agreed on that point.
“With her superior ability to capture the complications of human flesh in paint, Mary had picked up her husband’s gauntlet,” says the author. “The artistic battlefield would be the body of the very woman who had usurped Mary in her husband’s erotic imagination.”
Christopher Pratt and Donna Meaney in May 2013 (courtesy of Carol Bishop-Gwyn)
Meaney was initially hired to help Mary with the children and housework, but spent considerable time as Christopher's model. The consensual affair started when Donna was 16, the legal age for consent. But the author says the affair could have been seen as harassment because Meaney was working for the Pratts.
After the affair, Meaney severed ties with Christopher. She and her husband, Steve Haines, had a brief meeting with Bishop-Gwyn on Aug. 11, 2015.
“Donna stated her resentment that Christopher had apologized to Mary for the affair but not to Donna,” Bishop-Gwyn writes of the meeting. “Steve added his disapproval of Christopher’s behaviour.”
Christopher and Mary met at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., during the 1950s. Christopher came from Newfoundland’s well-to-do “merchant class.” Mary was from an establishment family in Fredericton. Both felt “entitled,” says Bishop-Gwyn.
They were wed in 1957 and lived for two years in Glasgow, so Christopher could continue his art studies. Then they settled in Newfoundland and, soon after, moved to a cottage in the rural Salmonier region, an hour west of St. John’s.
Mary Pratt circa 1968 (courtesy of the Pratt family)
They had four children within six years and Mary put her art career on hold for many years, although she managed to scrape together a half-hour or so each day to paint. Christopher soon became successful, mainly known for spare prints and paintings of architecture.
At age 32, Mary had her first show. It was in 1967 at Memorial University’s art gallery in St. John’s. All of the almost 60 works sold.
Over the years, Mary became known for her photo-realist paintings of everyday items in the kitchen – jars of jelly, salmon on tinfoil, chickens awaiting roasting. Generally, the public liked them. But some major art institutions did not embrace them the way they fawned over Christopher’s works.
Mary, unlike Christopher, never had a solo show at the National Gallery of Canada nor the Art Gallery of Ontario. “I feel terrible about that,” Mary complained in a 2013 Globe and Mail interview. “Because Christopher’s work always goes to those places and I just can’t get in.”
Yet, other leading galleries, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, showed interest in Mary’s work.
Mary knew her success was hard on Christopher’s ego. “In fact,” she told Maclean’s in 1981, “in the last year I was almost pleased if something had happened to my work so I could say, ‘Well, everything isn’t coming up roses for me.’”
The Pratts did not always live together during their marriage. Yet even when living apart, they often appeared together in public. It was difficult for outsiders to know the exact state of the marriage. They divorced in 2004. Afterwards, both married new partners. But within a few years, both were single again.
Mary died at home in St. John’s in 2018 at age 83, following years of ill health. During the last weeks of her life, Christopher drove every day from Salmonier to be with her. “You’re still a good old broad,” Christopher would jokingly say to Mary, provoking gales of laughter. ■
Art and Rivalry: The Marriage of Mary and Christopher Pratt, by Carol Bishop-Gwyn: Penguin Random House Canada, 2019.
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