Back in 1912, Winnipeg artist Mary Riter Hamilton was called “dangerous” by an influential adviser to the National Gallery of Canada and was essentially blackballed by the institution.
“I fear she is rather a dangerous person with her many friends and admirers,” Dr. Francis J. Shepherd, a member of the arts advisory board, which advised the gallery on art acquisitions, wrote in a letter to the board’s chair, Sir Edmund Walker.
As a new book reveals, Hamilton had many strikes against her in the opinion of the art establishment a century ago, but her failings did not, apparently, include production of inferior or subversive art.
In fact, Walker, just days before Shepherd’s letter, had publicly praised her work, amid a very successful national tour, as “masterful in coloring, adroit in draughtsmanship, deft in handling of tones and values and poetic in treatment of atmosphere and sentiment.”
Mary Riter Hamilton, ca. 1911-12, photograph (Ronald T. Riter collection)
But Hamilton was a woman, a suffragette and a champion of Western Canadian art. She could not accept that the few Canadian artworks deemed acceptable for annual acquisition by the National Gallery’s director, Eric Brown, and his advisory board were created only by men from Central Canada.
Hamilton, whose post-Impressionist work had already been favourably received at some of the annual Salons in Paris, was popular with Canadians from different walks of life. The then prime minister, Robert Borden, and the Governor General, the Duke of Connaught, had both purchased her work.
That made no difference to the National Gallery. You still won’t find one Hamilton painting there.
Irene Gammel
Details of Hamilton’s lifelong battle with the National Gallery are contained in an exhaustive new biography of this “dangerous” woman, I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton, by Irene Gammel, a professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University.
“Walker, Brown and Shepherd,” Gammel writes of the powerful gallery triumvirate, “agreed that such a troublesome woman, no matter how good her art, had no place in the nation’s gallery.”
Such an attitude makes one wonder how many other talented artists were ostracized over the years because their personalities, rather than their art, rankled the gallery’s pooh-bahs.
Mary Riter Hamilton, “Isolated Grave and Camouflage, Vimy Ridge,” May 1919
oil on wove paper (Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-223, copy negative C-141851)
Gammel’s book focuses on Hamilton’s exploits as a battlefield artist immediately after the First World War. During the war, Brown thwarted her attempts to become an official war artist. So, after the war, Hamilton, then in her early 50s, arranged a commission from the Amputation Club of British Columbia to paint the battlefields at Vimy Ridge and other notable sites.
Mary Riter Hamilton, “Evening on the Belgian Front,” no date
oil on cardboard, 7” x 9” (Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-153, copy negative C-103587)
Her venture was largely self-financed, and she spent three years in abject poverty, living alone in abandoned military huts as she painted the devastated landscape. Gammel’s meticulous research and cinematic prose allow readers to get a sense of Hamilton’s tortured, obsessive psyche while on the battlefields.
By 1922, Hamilton had produced a large body of work, which was exhibited widely in France to much acclaim. She was even awarded the Palmes académiques, second only to France’s Légion d'honneur. But the National Gallery could not be convinced to exhibit or acquire any of her paintings.
Mary Riter Hamilton, “Cloth Hall, Ypres – Market Day,” 1920
oil on wove paper (Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-162, copy negative C-104371)
Nevertheless, Hamilton’s fans continued to lobby the gallery to acquire the artist’s collection of battlefield scenes. Finally, in 1926, Brown wrote Hamilton a terse, two-paragraph letter offering to buy three of the paintings. Hamilton refused, unwilling to break up the collection. As well, Gammel suspects, Hamilton was insulted at Brown’s condescending attitude.
Instead, Hamilton arranged a donation of 227 paintings, drawings and sketches to the Public Archives of Canada, now Library and Archives Canada. There, the paintings are treasured.
Mary Riter Hamilton, “Dug Out on the Somme,” 1919
oil on cardboard, 14” x 17” (Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-3, copy negative C-104800)
Gilbert Gignac, an art historian formerly of Library and Archives Canada, helped organize a successful exhibition of Hamilton’s battlefield paintings that opened in 1989 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and then toured for five years across Canada and Europe. Gignac sees Hamilton’s work as important historically, but also as accomplished fine art.
“As an historian of fine arts, I consider Hamilton to be a very professional and excellent fine painter of diverse subjects,” says Gignac. Her work “clearly reveals that she understood and explored the expressive possibilities of painting in every way. The best of the paintings, drawings and prints that she created merit a deserving and rightful place next to any of her equally accomplished, female and male, contemporaries in any public gallery in Canada and elsewhere.”
Mary Riter Hamilton, “Clearing the Battlefields in Flanders,” 1921
oil on cardboard, 10” x 14” (Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-142, copy negative c-104244)
Jim Burant, another former Library and Archives Canada art historian, is one of Canada’s leading experts on early Canadian art. He says No Man’s Land was the “most successful” exhibition ever organized by the archives.
“Mrs. Hamilton’s work continues to resonate, and has been consulted by scholars from Europe, the United States and Australia with an interest both in the First World War, and in women’s art in the period,” says Burant.
“These works of art, much like the small panel paintings of her male compatriots in the future Group of Seven, capture the feeling of the battlefields and their aftermath with vibrancy and immediacy.
“Bright poppies adorn a shattered dugout; a temporary wooden cross sits in a lonely and denuded landscape. The shattered towns and villages, the trees lopped off by shot and shell, the broken, shell-torn fields, were all visible in her work, and left viewers in no doubt about what the battlefield experience had been like.”
Evidently, Burant and Gignac do not consider Hamilton a “dangerous” person.
Hamilton suffered ill health, both physical and mental, from the privations she endured during her battlefield years. Back in Canada, her health remained precarious. She died April 5, 1954 at Essondale Hospital, an institution for the mentally ill in Coquitlam, B.C. ■
I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton, by Irene Gammel. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020.
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