RE-MAPPING MODERNITY: THE SITES AND SIGHTS OF HELEN McNICOLL (1879-1915)

Samantha Burton

Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal, Quebec

June 2005

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts

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ABSTRACT

Canadian artist Helen McNicoIl (1879-1915) has long been neglected in art historical scholarship. Although well-known and well-regarded during her lifetime, her work has since been marginalized as feminine and dismissed as old-fashioned. Through the lens of a modernist art historical tradition that has privileged the urban and masculine above aIl else, McNicoll' s Impressionist depictions of sunlit beaches, open fields, and rural women at work may indeed seem quaintly nostalgie. In this thesis, 1 argue that these images can and should be seen as both representations of modernity and assertions of feminist thought. McNicoll travelled throughout England and Europe, and across the Atlantic Ocean in search of artistic subject matter; viewed within the context of tourism­ -which has been theorized as a fundamentally modern activity-her images appear modern in ways that have not traditionally been recognized.

RÉSUMÉ

Helen McNicoll (1879-1915), une artiste canadienne, avait été abandonée par les lettrés d'histoire d'art. Malgré le fait qu'elle était bien connue et admirée pendant sa vie, ses oeuvres sont maintenant marginalisées et banalisées à cause de leurs sujets féminins et ruraux. Vu que l'histoire d'art de l'époque moderne privilège les sujets masculins et urbains, les oeuvres Impressionistes de McNicoll, qui représentent souvent les plages, les champs, et les femmes aux travail dans la campagne, se ressemblent démodées. Dans ce thèse, je propose que ces images puissent et devraient être comprises comme modernes et féministes. McNicoll a voyagé à travers l'Angleterre et l'Europe à la recherche des sujets artistiques; nous devrons interpréter ses oeuvres dans ce contexte de tourisme, une . activité essentiellement moderne. iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis could not have been written without the help and support of many people. 1 would like to acknowledge Professor Brian Foss, Professor Kristina Huneault, and my classmates at McGill University for their feedback during the initial stages of this project.

The library staff at McGill, and particularly members of the Interlibrary Loan department, deserve credit for their friendly and helpful service. Thanks are also due to

Barb Duff at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, for making Helen

McNicoll's letters available to me. The faculty and staff of the Art History and

Communication Studies department at McGill also deserve many thanks.

My supervisor Professor Charmaine Nelson has followed this thesis from start to finish, and 1 am extremely grateful for her dedication to and beHef in this project. Her

support, encouragement, and advice have been remarkable.

My sincere thanks also go out to my parents, Joan and Bob Burton, and brother

Nicholas, who have been unfailingly supportive every step of the way. 1 could not have

done it without them.

Finally, my love and thanks to Jake Walsh Morrissey, who has patiently read

every word of this thesis several times, and who has provided a constant source of

encouragement. IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abbreviations ... V

List of Illustrations ... vi

Introduction ... 1

Chapter 1: Sites of Production: Helen McNicoll and the Rural Artist Colony .,. 18

Chapter 2: Sightseeing: Landscape and Tourism in the Work of Helen McNicoll ... 41

Chapter 3: 'A Spectacle of Difference:' Representing the Rural Working Woman ... 66

Conclusion ... 92

Appendix ... 99

Bibliography ... 101

Illustrations ... 110 v

ABBREVIATIONS

AAM .Art Association of Montreal (Montreal, QC)

AGO Art Gallery of Ontario (foronto, ON)

AGT Art Gallery of Toronto (foronto, ON)

RA Royal Academy (London, England)

RBA Royal Society of British Artists (London, England)

RCA Royal Canadian Academy (Ottawa, ON)

SIAC St. Ives Arts Club (St. Ives, Cornwall, England) VI

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

(Map 1) Artists' Colonies in Europe. In: Lübbren, Nina. Rural Artists' Colonies, 1870- 1910. New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 2001. xv.

(Map 2) Artists' Colonies in Europe and the United States. In: Jacobs, Michael. The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America. Oxford: Phaidon, 1985.6. *** (Fig. 1) Helen McNicoll, The Open Door, c. 1913. ail on canvas, 76.2 x 63.5 cm. Private collection, Toronto. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicol/: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGa, 1999. 69. '

(Fig. 2) Helen McNicoll, Under the Shadow of the Tent, 1914. ail on canvas, 83.5 x 101.2 cm. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGO, 1999.71.

(Fig. 3) Photograph of Helen McNicol/ in her studio, St. Ives, Cornwall, c. 1906. In: Murray, Joan. Helen McNicoll, 1879-1915: Oil Paintingsfrom the Estate. Toronto: Morris Gallery, 1974.

(Fig. 4) Dorothea Sharp, On the Beach, 1914. ail on board, 35.5 x 44.5 cm. David Messum, London. In: Duval, Paul. Canadian Impressionism. Toronto and London: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. 10.

(Fig. 5) Albrecht Dürer, Artist and Model: Demonstration of Perspective, 1527. From Dürer's Treatise on Measurement, 2nd edition, 1538. Woodcut. In: Broude, Norma. Impressionism: A Feminist Reading; The Gendering ofArt, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Rizzoli, 1991. 148.

(Fig. 6) Thomas Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, c. 1748. ail on canvas, 119 x 69 cm. National Gallery, London. In: Rosenthal, Michael. The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: ua little business for the Eye." New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. 18.

(Fig. 7) Helen McNicoIl, Gathering Flowers, c. 1912. Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 63.5 cm. Private collection, Toronto. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGa, 1999.58.

(Fig. 8) Helen McNicoll, Picking Flowers, c. 1912. ail on canvas, 94 x 78.8 cm. AGa, Toronto. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicol/: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGa, 1999.59. vii

(Fig. 9) Helen McNicoll, Reaping Time, c. 1909. Oil on canvas, 63 x 76.8 cm. Private collection, Vancouver. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGa, 1999.43.

(Fig. 10) Helen McNicoll, Tea Time, c. 1911. ail on canvas, 63 x 52 cm. Private collection, Toronto. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGa, 1999.31.

(Fig. 11) Helen McNicoll, A Retreat, c. 1911. Oil on canvas, 46 x 41 cm. Private collection, Toronto. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGO, 1999.32.

(Fig. 12) Helen McNicoll, Sunny Days, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 64.2 x 77 cm. Private collection, Vancouver. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian /mpressionist. Toronto: AGO, 1999.30.

(Fig. 13) Helen McNicoll, On the Beach, c. 1912. Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76.2 cm. Private collection. In: Duval, Paul. Canadian /mpressionism. Toronto and London: McClelland and Stewart, 1990.95.

(Fig. 14) Helen McNicoll, On the Cliffs, c. 1913. Oil on canvas, 50.9 x 61 cm. Private collection, Toronto. In: Huneault, Kristina. "Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoll." Art History 27, no. 2 (April 2004): 229.

(Fig. 15) Helen McNicoll, Sunny September, 1913. Oil on canvas, 92 x 107.5 cm. Private collection, Fonthill. In: Huneault, Kristina. "Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoll." Art History 27, no. 2 (April 2004): 215.

(Fig. 16) Claude Monet, Cliffs at Varengville, 1882. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81cm. Lefevre Gallery, London. In: Herbert, Robert L. Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867-1886. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.53.

(Fig. 17) Laura Knight, Two Girls on a Cliff, c. 1917. Oil on canvas, 60 x 72.5 cm. Sotheby's. In: Fox, Caroline. Dame Laura Knight. Oxford: Phaidon, 1988.31.

(Fig. 18) Marianne Preindlsberger-Stokes, The Passing Train, c. 1890. Oil on canvas, 61 x 76.2 cm. Private collection. In: McConkey, Kenneth./mpressionism in Britain. London: Yale University Press and Barbican Art Gallery, 1995. 197.

(Fig. 19) Helen McNicoll, The Apple Gatherer, c. 1911. Oil on canvas, 106.8 x 92.2 cm. Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian /mpressionist. Toronto: AGO, 1999.29. viii

(Fig. 20) Helen McNicoll, The Little Worker, c. 1907. Oil on canvas, 61 x 51.3 cm. AGO, Toronto. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGO, 1999.51.

(Fig. 21) Helen McNicoll, The Gleaner, c. 1908. Oil on canvas, 76.3 x 63.8 cm. Private collection, Toronto. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGO, 1999.45.

(Fig. 22) Helen McNicoll, Photograph ofDorothea Sharp and model, c. 1908. In: Murray, Joan. Helen McNicoll, 1879-1915: Oil Paintingsfrom the Estate. Toronto: Morris Gallery, 1974.

(Fig. 23) Helen McNicoll, Photograph of Dorothea Sharp and mode l, c. 1908. In: Murray, Joan. Helen McNicoll, 1879-1915: Oil Paintingsfrom the Estate. Toronto: Morris Gallery, 1974.

(Fig. 24) Paul Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon, 1888. Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm. Art Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. In: Brettell, Richard, and Caroline Brettell. Painters and Peasants in the Nineteenth Century. Geneva: Rizzoli, 1983.96.

(Fig. 25) George Elgar Hicks, The Sinews ofOld England, 1857. Watercolour on paper, 76 x 53.5 cm. Private collection. In: Barringer, Tim. "The Gendering of Artistic Labour in Mid-Victorian Britain." In Representations of Gender from Prehistory to the Present, edited by Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe, 153-167. London: MacMillan Press, 2000. 156.

(Fig. 26) Jules Bastien Lepage, Les Foins, 1878. ail on canvas, 180 x 195 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. In: McConkey, Kenneth. British Impressionism. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989. 30.

(Fig. 27) Camille Pissarro, Apple Picking at Eragny, 1888. Oil on canvas, 59 x 72 cm. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas. In: Brettell, Richard, and Caroline Brettell. Painters and Peasants in the Nineteenth Century. Geneva: Rizzoli, 1983.49.

(Fig. 28) Adolphe-William Bouguereau, The Broken Pitcher, 1891. Oil on canvas, 135 x 84 cm. The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco. In: Brettell, Richard, and Caroline Brettell. Painters and Peasants in the Nineteenth Century. Geneva: Rizzoli, 1983. 108.

(Fig. 29) Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857. Oil on canvas, 83.7 x 111 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. In: Jacobs, Michael. The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America. Oxford: Phaidon, 1985.21.

(Fig. 30) Open page of Helen McNicoll's scrapbook, c. 1900. Private collection, Acton. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGa, 1999. 56. ix

(Fig. 31) Helen McNicoll, A Welcame Breeze, c. 1909. Oil on canvas, 51.3 x 61.8 cm. Private collection, Acton. In: Luckyj, Natalie. Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist. Toronto: AGO, 1999. 60.

(Fig. 32) Helen McNicoll, The Fruit Vendor, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 61.6 x 51.4 cm. Location unknown. In: Heffel Gallery. "Heffel.com." . (Accessed 21 March,2oo5).

(Fig. 33) Paul Gauguin, Woman Halding a Fruit (Where Are Yau Going?), 1893. Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. In: French Painting from the Hermitage, Leningrad: Mid-lgth ta Early-2(Jh Century. 4th edition. Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1987. 1

INTRODUCTION

The Open Door (1913) (fig. 1) was painted by Canadian artist Helen McNicoll

(1879-1915) in the same year as her election to the prestigious Royal Society of British

Artists. The image depicts a solitary woman, clad entirely in white, sewing a white cloth against the backdrop of an open door. The room she inhabits is sparsely decorated: she shares the space with a silver pitcher, a candlestick, and a mirror, ail sitting atop a small side table, which is also covered in a white cloth. The use of the same shades of white, grey, sil ver, and beige on the dress, cloth, wall, table, mirror, and floor make it difficult to tell where one object ends and the next one begins, ultimately making it seem as though everything in the room-including the woman-fits naturally into the space.

The painting was singled out for sorne notice in the press: remarking on the

"Iovely silvery grey" of the woman 's dress, a writer for the Montreal Gazette Iikened the image to McNicoll 's other interiors with figures, such as The Chintz Sofa (c. 1913) and

The Victorian Dress (c. 1914).1 Like these images, The Open Door contains signs that indicate the artist's unease with this natural domesticity. Kristina Huneault notes that

"McNicoll' s use of the threshold motif instantiates an obvious Iiminality,"2 and notes the. strangeness of the mirror that doesn 't reflect anything, the uncertainty of what the woman is sewing, and the peculiarity of the woman 's standing position.3 However, 1 would argue that the most interesting element of the painting is the glimpse into the outdoors that the

l "Memorial Show of Work by Canadian," Montreal Gazette, November 10, 1925. 5. 2 Kristina Huneault, "Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoII," Art History 27, no. 2 (April 2004): 222. 3 Huneault, 222-23. 2 open door reveals. Natalie Luckyj says that the woman is "located on the boundary between two worlds traditionally associated with women - the domestic space and the external world of nature.'>4 However, we might equally read the outdoors as "the antithesis of domesticity-as the outside world of society and public activity."s 1 believe that the visual evidence supports the latter interpretation: the broad colour fields of muted grey and white in the interior make the quick, loose brushstrokes of bright yellow, brown, and gold of the trees of the exterior space stand out, beckoning the viewer and woman outside. According to Huneault, this contrast "initiates an understated game between emptiness and fullness:,,6 while inside "stillness and quietude [may] permeate,,,7 outside, there is warmth, movement, and energy. The title of the work further suggests a world of opportunity: indeed, the woman's coat and hat hang on the door, ready to be worn. This is an image about potential, specifically, about the potential for women to live beyond the domestic sphere in the public spaces of the modern world.

The Open Door aptly symbolizes the public and scholarly interest in McNicoll' s work. In the few texts that deal with the artist's diverse oeuvre, there has been an overwhelming emphasis on her images of women and girls sewing, reading, minding babies, and playing in gardens; in other words, on the figure inside the home in The Open

Door. The primary critical analyses of her imagery have been concerned with the extent to which she does or does not conform to the ideals of Victorian and Edwardian femininity. No one has attempted an extended discussion of McNicoll's many and diverse images of the outdoors-Iandscapes, seascapes, village streets-and, importantly,

4 Natalie Luckyj, Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist (Toronto: AGO, 1999),68. 5 Lynne Lacombe Robinson, "Tranquil Transgressions: The Formation of a Feminine Social Identity in Helen McNicoll's Representations ofWomen," MA Thesis, University of Alberta, 2003.19. 6 Huneault, 222. 7 Luckyj, 70. 3 the people who live and work in these spaces. My work here is to step beyond the threshold depicted in The Open Door, and examine McNicoll's outdoor images, many of which can be read as an explicit challenge to the feminine ideals of her time, and aIl of which work to expand and disrupt the traditional definitions of modernity and modernism. *** Helen McNicoll, born in Toronto in 1879 (and moving to Montreal a year after her birth), achieved a significant level of success as a professional artist before dying of diabetes in England in 1915 at the early age of thirty-six. Undeterred by deafness (caused by a bout of scarlet fever when she was two), McNicoll' s art education was extensive and took place in sorne of the most advanced institutions accessible to her.8 Beginning in her hometown, McNicoll studied at the Art Association of Montreal9 under William Brymner

(1855-1925), who likely encouraged her in the Impressionist technique and plein-air practice that would become trademarks of her work. 10 In 1902, McNicollleft Montreal

8 McNicoIl's professional opportunties were necessarily Iimited by her gender, in terms of the possibilities for exhibition and institutional membership, as weIl as education. Aside from Charlotte Schreiber (1834- 1922), who was elected when the Royal Canadian Academy was founded in 1880, and whose membership privileges were severely curtailed, a woman was not elected to full membership at the RCA until Marion Long (1892-1970) in 1933; the British Royal Academy elected Laura Knight (1877-1970) in 1936, the first woman to hold the position since the elections of Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) and Mary Moser (1744- 1819) at the RA's founding in 1768. In terms of education, while women were permitted to attend ail major art schools by this time, they were not yet allowed ail of the same opportunities as men (the same life drawing classes, for example). The history of women artists in the late-nineteenth century is a fascinating subject, but unfortunately one that this thesis has insufficient space to examine with the detail it deserves. For more on professional women artists in nineteenth-century England, see Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); for Canada, see Anne Mandely Page, "Canada's First Professional Women Painters, 1890-1914: Their Reception in Canadian Writing on the Visual Arts," MA Thesis, Concordia University, 1991; and Maria Tippett, By A Lady: Celebrating Three Centuries of Art By Canadian Women (Toronto: Viking, 1992). 9 The AAM became the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1948-49. 10 Luckyj, 23. 4 for London, to study at the Slade School of Art during "the years of its greatest vitality."l1

The Slade was known as a site of anti-academic avant-garde art practice, and was particularly welcoming to women students: contemporary Charlotte Weeks states,

"[h]ere, for the first time in England, indeed in Europe, a public Fine Art School was thrown open to male and female students on precisely the same terms, and giving to both sexes fair and equal opportunities.,,12

From the Slade, likely in 1905, McNicoll moved on to the artist colony at St. Ives in Cornwall, England, where she studied at the School of Landscape and Sea Painting, under teachers Julius Olsson (1864-1942) and Algernon Talmage (1871-1939). St. Ives was also where McNicoll met fellow artist Dorothea Sharp (1878-1955), who would remain a constant source of companionship and professional support throughout

McNicoll's career. 13 McNicoll went on to travel throughout England and Europe, visiting artist colonies in Walberswick and Grèz-sur-Loing. According to several newspaper

Il Hilary Taylor, '''If A Young Painter Be Not Fierce And Arrogant God ... Help Him:' SomeWomen Art Students at the Slade, c. 1895-9," Art History 9, no. 2 (June 1986): 233. 12 Charlotte J. Weeks, "Women at Work: The Slade Girls," Magazine ofArt 6 (1883): 325. Although the reputation of the Slade was as an equal opportunity institution, this was not actually the case. For more on women at the Slade in the years surrounding McNicoll's time there, see Taylor and Alicia Foster, "Gwen John's Self-Portrait: Art, Identity, and Women Art Students at The Slade School," in English Art, 1860- 1914: Modern Artists and Identity, ed. David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry, 168-79 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 13 The nature of the relationship between McNicoll and Sharp is ambiguous. Sharp is often mentioned in McNicoll's letters home-she even writes a note to McNicoll's father at the end of one letter (Helen McNicoll to David McNicoll, 200ctober 1914. Artists' Files, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON)-and the often similar subject matter of their paintings shows that they worked closely. They also shared a home and studio in London, a fact noted by the Montreal Daily Star in 1913: "[s]he has since Iived in London for several years, sharing a studio with another girl artist" ("Miss McNicoll Nowa Member of Royal Art Society," Montreal Daily Star, April 2, 1913. 2). It is apparent from McNicoll's letters that they also Iived and worked together in various art colonies in England and France. There is no evidence for a romantic relationship between the two women, and 1 hesitate to locate one where it might not exist: it was, after all, common for single women of this period to travel and work with a female friend or colleague; these friendships provided both companionship and safety for women Iiv ing independently in a time when this was a controversial choice. Regardless of their actual relationship, which will probably never be determined with certainty, it is significant that, as Kristina Huneault has pointed out, "McNicoll forsook the gendered and heterosexual contract of marriage" in favour of a close relationship with another woman (234). In the interest of acknowledging these ambiguities, 1 will simply refer to Sharp as McNicoII's partner throughout this thesis. 5 accounts, she opened a studio in France for a time. 14 McNicoll seems to have lived abroad, based in London, from this point on, although she came back to Montreal for a part of every year, and apparently kept a studio in her hometown. 15

White McNicoll sold very few works to public institutions during her lifetime,16 she had an extensive exhibiting career, showing her work from 1906 on at sorne of the leading establishments of her day, induding the AAM, the RCA, the Ontario Society of

Artists, and the Canadian National Exhibition, in Canada, and the RBA and the Society of Women Artists in England.17 In 1926, a decade after her death, her work was induded in the inaugural exhibition of the Art Gallery of Toronto. lB In this very large exhibition,

McNicoll was represented in a section devoted to deceased Canadian artists such as Tom

Thomson (1877-1917), Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-1872), and James Wilson Morrice

(1865-1924), company that Joan Murray remarks is "a measure of respect shown to

14 "Death Cuts Short Promising Career," Montreal Gazette, June 28, 1915.5; "Honor Montreal Artist," Montreal Gazette, April 2, 1913.2; "Memorial Show of Work by Canadian;" "Miss McNicoll Nowa Member of Royal Art Society." McNicoll also seems to have studied formally in Paris, although this is poorly documented. Paul Duval quotes an undated, unreferenced letter in which she states, "Paris 1 found very inspiring, but 1 only studied there for three months" (Paul Duval, Canadian Impressionism [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990],98). This is the only evidence for a Parisian art education. 15 "Memorial Show of Work by Canadian;" "Death Cuts Short Promising Career;" "Honor Montreal Artist." 16 Stubble Fields (1912) was bought by the National Gallery of Canada in 1912; The Farmyard was purchased by the SaintJohn Art Club, a women's art association, in 1915 (Luckyj, 53). The latter was bought from the Canadian Artists' Patriotic Fund, a travelling exhibition held to raise money for World War l, to which McNicoll had donated the painting, a fact noted with pride by the press ("Memorial Show of Work by Canadian;" "Death Cuts Short Promising Career"). McNicolI did successfully sell her work to individuals. Luckyj notes that the well-known Montreal art collector William Van Home bought September Morning in 1909 (20), and the catalogue to her Memorial Exhibition at the AAM suggests that the Van Hornes owned more than one piece, as did the Trenholme and Ballantyne families. The catalogue also indicates that one of her works-Sketch-was owned by fellow artist Alberta Cleland (1876-1960) (Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Helen G. McNicoll, RBA, ARCA [Montreal: AAM, 1925]). While there are several works simply entitled "Sketch" in the catalogue, it is interesting to speculate that this is the Sketch described by an earlier newspaper article as "a vigourously brushed-in composition-a girl in a white smock painting at an easle [sic] in an orchard" ("Honor Montreal Artist"), demonstrating the obvious shared interest of the two women. 17 Luckyj, 44. 18 The Art Gallery of Toronto became the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1966. 6

McNicoll."19 McNicoll was one of only three women (with Florence Carlyle [1864-1923]

and Mary Hiester Reid [1854-1921]) to be included.2° A year earlier, the AAM had

honoured her work with a large memorial exhibition, showing more than 140 paintings

and sketches. Once again, McNicoll was one of only three Canadian women to whom the

honour of a major solo memorial show was accorded in the 1920s.21

McNicoll's talent was well-recognized during her lifetime. She was awarded a

scholarship to the AAM for her drawings,22 and graduated from the Slade with first-class

honours.23 She was awarded the AAM's first Jessie Dow Prize-for "best original oil

painting" - in 1908, for her landscape September Evening, an honour she shared with

fellow Impressionist W.J. Clapp (1879-1954). The Montreal Gazette recorded her win,

saying "her four canvases in this year's exhibition aroused discussion and recognition

from the first.,,24 Six years later, McNicoll won the Women's Art Society prize for her

canvas Under the Shadow a/the Tent (1914). McNicoll was elected to the RBA in 1913,

an honour celebrated by the press in Montreal: the Gazette published a lengthy article

celebrating the occasion,25 and the Daily Star marked the accomplishment with an article

. accompanied by photographs of the artist and her studio in London.26 One year tater,

McNicoll became an associate member of the RCA.27

19 Joan Murray, Helen McNicoll, 1879-1915: Oil Paintingsfrom the Estate (Toronto: Morris Gallery, 1974). 20 Three of McNicoll's paintings were shown, and two each by Reid and Carlyle (Catalogue of Inaugural Exhibition [Toronto: AGT, 1926]). 21 The two other women were once again Mary Hiester Reid and Aorence Carlyle. Reid's exhibition was held in 1922, Carlyle's in 1925; both were at the AGT (Page, 57-58). 22 Luckyj, 76-77 23 Duval, 92. 24 "A ward Art Prizes," Montreal Gazette, March 31, 1908. 9. 25 "Honor Montreal Artist." 26 "Miss McNicoll Nowa Member of Royal Art Society." 27 Luckyj, 17. Only nineteen women were elected associates in the half-century between the founding of the RCA in 1880 and Marion Long's election as a full member in 1933 (Dorothy Farr and Natalie Luckyj, From Women's Eyes: Women Pa inters in Canada [Kingston, ON: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 1975],3). 7

***

Unfortunately, the popularity McNicoll experienced during her Iifetime is not mirrored in the Iiterature published since her death. Natalie Luckyj attributed this lack of scholarship to an almost total absence of letters, diaries, and other textual documentation, as weil as to the fact that many of her paintings remain in private collections, inaccessible to the public.28 However, there are other reasons for McNicoll's exile from Canadian art history. Anne Mandely Page has found a widespread lack of knowledge about-and

scholarly interest in-what she caUs the "first wave" of professional women artists in

Canada.29 Like Helen McNicolI, women such as Laura Muntz LyaU [1860-1930], Mary

Hiester Reid, and Florence Carlyle were acknowledged professionals, and were generaIly favourably received in the press up until the 1920s?O However, these "early successes

were not to be followed by steady progress in the decades that followed,'m and women

Iike McNicoll were written off as amateurs and forgotten until feminism made inroads

into art history in the 1970s.

Survey texts of Canadian art are neglectful when it cornes to women' s art at the

tum of the twentieth century. Although he does dedicate a chapter to the work of women

artists, McNicoll merits only a brief mention in the biographical notes at the end of

Newton MacTavish's The Fine Arts in Canada (1925)?2 The other major surveys of

Canadian art-William Colgate' s Canadian Art: Its Origin and Development (1943), 1.

28 Luckyj, 15. 29 Page. 3. 30 Page, 35. 31 Page, 57. 32 Newton MacTavish, The Fine Arts in Canada (Toronto: The MacMillan Company of Canada, 1925). 1 believe that MacTavish's omission of McNicoll is likely due to the perception noted in the Montreal Daily Star that her images "show her rather as an English pain ter" ("Pictures and Sketches by Helen G. McNicoll at The Art Association," Montreal Daily Star, November Il, 1925. 4), as he has also neglected other significant artists, such as Harriet Ford (1859-1938) and Elizabeth Armstrong-Forbes (1859-1912), who spent the majority of their time abroad. 8

Russell Harper's Painting in Canada: A History (1966), and Dennis Reid's A Concise

History ofCanadian Painting (1973)-erase her entirely?3 McNicoll has clearly been excluded from the canon of Canadian art.

McNicoll fares better in studies of Canadian Impressionism and Canadian women artists, although analysis of her work in these texts is limited to short discussions of her

Impressionist style and "feminine" subject matter?4 In the last five years, however,

McNicoll has begun to arouse the interest of scholars willing to discuss her work in a critical and feminist manner. A major exhibition held at the AGO in 1999-the only solo show dedicated to McNicoll' s work since a small gallery showing of her art in Toronto in

197435-seems to have been the impetus for this interest. Natalie Luckyj's accompanying catalogue remains the only book devoted to McNicoll, but has been followed by a

Master's thesis by Lynne Lacombe Robinson in 2003 and a lengthy article by Kristina

Huneault in 2004. These three critical texts represent an important leap forward in scholarship, placing McNicoll and her work in the context of women' s art practice at the tum of the twentieth century. Pushing beyond the simple maxim that McNicoll painted women and children in quai nt domestic situations, these three scholars posit that

33 William Colgate, Canadian Art: Its Origin and Development (Toronto: Ryerson, 1943); J. Russell Harper, Painting in Canada: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966); Dennis Reid, A Concise History ofCanadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973). 34 See, for example, Duval; Farr and Luckyj; Julia Gualtieri, "The Woman as Artist and Subject in Canadian Painting (1890-1930): Florence Carlyle, Laura Muntz Lyall, Helen McNicoll," MA Thesis, Queen's University, 1989; Carol Lowrey, '''Into Line with the Progress of Art:' The Impressionist Tradition in Canadian Painting, 1885-1920," in Visions of Light and Air: Canadian lmpressionism, 1885- 1920, ed. Carol Lowrey, 15-39 (New York: Americas Society Art Gallery, 1995); Joan Murray, lmpressionism in Canada, 1895-1935 (Toronto: AGO, 1974); Dennis Reid, "Impressionism in Canada," in World lmpressionism: The International Movement, 1860-1920, ed. Norma Broude, 92-113 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990); Tippett 3S The Morris Gallery showed fifty of her works when they came up for auction in 1974. The accompanying catalogue was illustrated only in black and white, and the text was limited to a brief biography of the artist (Murray, Helen McNicoll, 1879-1915) 9

McNicoll did not do so unproblematically, locating a nascent feminism in her images of women sewing, reading, and going about their daily chores. *** Unfortunately, the perception that Helen McNicoll was a "feminine" painter of old-fashioned subjects persists. In the preface to Luckyj's catalogue, Matthew Teitelbaum notes her preference in subject matter for the "Arcadian idyll,,36 and states,

Hers was a world of relative innocence that suggested an optimism widely shared before the outbreak of the Pirst World War. It is noteworthy that McNicoll's career came to an end with her early death, just a handful of years after Matisse's great breakthrough into Fauvism and Picasso and Braque's leap into the conceptually based Cubist movement, because it makes aIl the more apparent McNicoll' s heartfelt and deeply experienced nostalgia for an art that communicated values of an earlier time.37 ln this short statement, Teitelbaum reveals the biases of modemist art history, and succinètly accounts for why McNicoIl has been erased from the canons of Canadian art history. My purpose in this thesis is to contest this way of thinking about McNicoIl. 1 contend that not only are McNicoll's images potentially feminist (as daim Huneault,

Luckyj, and Robinson), but also that they are decidedly modemist. Such a daim will require a deconstruction of what Griselda Pollock has called the "masculinist myths of modemism. ,,38

Modemist art history must be recognized as "a selective tradition which normalizes, as the only modemism, a particular and gendered set of practices.,,39 This tradition has exduded women Iike McNicoll by privileging the work of white, middle-

36 Luckyj, 13. 37 Luckyj, 13. 38 Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories ofArt (London: Routledge, 1988), 50-90. 50. 39 Pollock, 50. 10 and upper-class men and urban subject matter above all other kinds of art and artists. It is for these two main reasons that McNicoll has been erased from art history.

Teitelbaum's invocation of McNicoll's near contemporaries Matisse (1869-1954),

Picasso (1881-1973), and Braque (1882-1963) as the fathers of modern art, is meant to create a stark contrast to her old-fashioned style and subject matter, and makes the idea that modernity and modernism were phenomena conceived and practiced by men very clear. Carol Duncan has shown that an overwhelming number of images painted by the artists who have been embraced by art history-Picasso and Matisse, among others-are assertions of masculinity and sexual virility. Duncan compellingly argues that while the modernist glorification of the avant-garde is based on the celebration of universal individual freedom, the images resulting from these ideals very often depict "women as powerless, sexually subjugated beings:,,40 universal freedom, one gathers, can only be had by middle- and upper-class white men.41

Lisa Tickner has also explored these ideas in the specifie context of English art in the years leading up to World War 1. Showing that masculinity was in crisis at thefin de siècle due to such diverse factors as imperialism, aestheticism, and, especially, feminism,42 Tickner demonstrates that modernist art was, in the words of Wyndham

Lewis (1882-1957), '''rough and masculine work. ",43 For Tickner, as for Duncan, the modern was founded on individualism and a search for identity. She states, "the exploration of a modern self-determined identity is the modem subject matter ... These

40 Carol Duncan, "Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting," in The Aesthetics of Power: Essays in Critical Art History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 81- 108.81. 41 Duncan, 81-83. 42 Lisa Tickner, "Men's Work? Masculinity and Modernism," in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, 42-82 (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994),48-49. 43 Tickner, 42. 11 issues cannot be addressed by a modernist art history which, at its crudest, leaves women out, or which, alternatively, retraces an essential, and thus unmodern femininity in the work.'>44

These ideas are well-illustrated in the case of Helen McNicoll. McNicoll was acknowledged by the press as a modern artist,45 and seems to have self-identified as such: she writes bemusedly to her father after her election to the RBA,

It was the older members who didn't like my things, one old man was very angry and said to Dolly, 'If that picture is right, then the National Gallery is aIl wrong.' One nice old man said to D., 'It will be a bitter pill for sorne now that your friend is elected.' 1 must send sorne of my old things there 1 guess.46

These contemporary reports contradict recent texts that describe McNicoll and her contemporaries as painters of "gentle subjects.'>47 Carol Lowrey, for example, states that

McNicoll, like other women Impressionists, "favoured genteel subjects, depicting women and children in interiors or in outdoor settings, often in conjunction with the floral environment and/or leisure activity. Inspired by Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, many explored maternai themes, combining female empathy with the formaI concerns of

Impressionism."48 Maria Tippett agrees: "Canadian women painters were content, for the most part, with the maternité theme.'>49 These statements stand in sharp relief to

McNicoll's obituary in Saturday Night, which states that McNicoll "afforded a striking

44 Tickner, 44. 4S For references to McNicolI as 'modern,' see the following: "Miss McNicoll Nowa Member of Royal Art Society;" "Honor Montreal Artist." White sorne reports seem now to be old fashioned-the Gazette states favourably that she was "unimpressed and unaffected by the latest movements in art" and that she "attain[ed] her ends without extravagant colour or freaksh treatment," ("Death Cuts Short Promising Career" Montreal Gazette, June 28, 1915. 5)-they also laud her individuality and originality.1t is clear that for contemporary reviewers, it is these qualties, not participation in a vanguard style, that makes an artist modem. 46 Helen McNicoll to David McNicolI, 19 March 1913. Artists' Files, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa,ON. 47 Farr and Luckyj, 30 48 Lowrey, 33. 49 Tippett, 35. 12 contrast to the prevaiting type of feminine painter."so By reading between contemporary criticism and modern art historical scholarship, it becomes clear that the insistence on essential femininity, and as Tickner has pointed out, the necessarily un modern, is a construction of art history, and one which has kept McNicoll from the recognition she deserves.

An equally insistent bias of modernist art history is the privileging of the urban- particularly of Paris, but of London, Berlin, and later New York, as well-over the rural.

The images which dominate the modern canon-we might think of Bar at the Folies-

Bergères (1881-82) by Edouard Manet (1832-1883) as a prime example-have as their subject matter the spaces of the modern city: bars, brothels, clubs, and crowded streets are ail powerful signifiers of modernity.51 White traditional scholarship has accepted this relationship between the modern and the urban unproblematically, the issue of women' s access (or lack thereof) to these spaces has recently become an important focus of investigation. The work of Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock is central here. Wolff posits that it is because of the conflation of the modern with the public that women have been systematically excised from the history of the modern era.52 Pollock takes up this argument with specifie regard to women's art in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. Pollock complicates the relationship between gender and modern city space, adding class to the equation, and arguing that "[t]hese territories of the bourgeois city sa "A Loss to Canadian Art," Saturday Night, 28, July 10, 1915. 3. 51 Although it might he argued that sorne notahly "modern" artists-Van Gogh (1853-1890), Gauguin (1848-1903), and Bernard (1868-1941), among others-did choose to paint the countryside, 1 agree with Griselda Pollock, who writes, 'During 1888, Gauguin, Bernard, and Van Gogh allleft Paris. It was a curious move to make at that time, given the avant-garde's strong identification with urban and suburban locations. They placed themselves at a geographical distance from the metropolitan avant-garde culture. But ideologically they remained part of it and identified by it" Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits. 1888-1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992),49. 52 Janet Wolff, "The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity," Theory. Culture. and Society 2, no. 3 (1985): 37. 13 were however not only gendered on a male/female polarity. They became the sites for the negotiation of gendered class identities and class gender positions. The spaces of modernity are where class and gender interface in critical ways, in that they are spaces of sexual exchange. ,,53 There were, after aIl, women in the public sphere, but rather than being an audience for the new modern forms of leisure, they were working to produce them. Because of the link between respectability and femininity, it was bourgeois women who were restricted from modern space: ladies who performed at bars and worked at brothels were not ladies at aIl.54

Recent work on London in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods is less pessimistic, and has found that women did indeed participate in modern city life.

Scholars such as Deborah Cherry, Sally Ledger, Deborah Epstein Nord, Lynne Walker, and Judith Walkowitz, have worked to reinstate women of aIl classes back into the modern urban environment through such diverse activities as philanthropy, shopping, and, eventuaIly, political activism.55

However, even as these scholars work to deconstruct the myths of modernity and modernism, the idea that "modernity as a nineteenth-century phenomenon is a product of the city,,56 remains extremely powerful-and extremely limiting. Helen McNicoll was one of thousands of artists painting at the turn of the twentieth century who chose to leave

S3 Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity ," 70. 54 Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," 73-9. S5 Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850-1900 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997); Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); Lynne Walker, "Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of London, 1850-1900," in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Cambell Orr, 70-85 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995); Judith R. Walkowitz, City ofDreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 56 Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," 66. 14 the city in search of rural subject matter, and who have since been abandoned by scholars who dismiss them as old fashioned and nostalgie. This is a prejudice of modernist art history, and does not reflect the historical reality. White today, a": image of a sunny

beach, a wheat field, or a farm girl may appear as a representation of the "Arcadian

idyll," these subjects were fundamentally modern in ways that are not now recognized as

signs of modernity.

First among these, and the focus of this thesis, is tourism. Scholars such as Dean

MacCannell, John Urry, James Buzard, and Nina Lübbren have proposed that tourism, as

practiced at the turn of the twentieth century, is a fundamentally modern activity.S7

MacCannell discusses tourism as a search for identity, constructed through encounters

with the 'other':

Self-discovery through a complex and sometimes arduous search for an Absolute Other is a basic theme of our civilization ... This theme does not just thread its way through our literature and our history. It grows and develops, arriving at a kind of final flowering in modernity. What begins as the proper activity of a hero (Alexander the Great) develops into the goal of a socially organized group (the Crusaders), into the mark of status of an entire social dass (The Grand Tour of the British 'gentlemen'), eventually becoming a universal experience (the tourist).S8

Once again, the modern is located in a search for self-identity. White tourism is certainly

not the utopian "universal experience" that MacCannell implies-access to travel as a

leisure activity was and is limited by class, gender, and race-it was, in the late

57 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory o/the Leisure C/ass, 3n! edition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of CaIifornia Press, 1999); John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2"d edition (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage, 2002); James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Nina Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 1870-1910 (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 2001). 58 MacCannell, 5. 15 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more accessible than ever before.s9 It is within this context that Helen McNicolllived and worked.

Tourism will provide a way of looking at McNicoll's images of the rural outdoors that clearly positions her as a modern artist. Chapter 1 will examine the widespread

phenomenon of the rural artist colony occurring at the end of the nineteenth and

beginning of the twentieth centuries. Nina Lübbren has found that over three thousand

artists travelled to close to one hundred colonies, in countries across Europe from 1830-

1910.60 McNicoll was one of these artists, visiting several colonies in England and France

over the course of her career. 1 will examine her time at St. Ives, in Cornwall, England in

order to demonstrate that the rural art colony offered women like McNicoll the

opportunity to work independently and explore modern subject matter.

Chapters 2 and 3 will examine the subjects McNicoll painted during her stays in

the countryside. Chapter 2 will focus on McNicoll's landscape paintings. Although many

of her images are views of the outdoors, they are rarely classified as landscapes. In this

chapter, 1 hope to deconstruct the idea of landscape, and explore the ways McNicoll's

images may be considered both feminist-they resist the traditional male gaze which has,

in the past, defined landscape-and modern, as several of her landscapes offer

commentary on the subject of modern tourism.

Chapter 3 focuses on the people painted by McNicoll and her contemporaries in

the countryside. Always a part of the rural art colony lifestyle, the locals often provided

subject matter for the artists' brush, themselves becoming the sights that tourists hoped to

see. Country dwellers were painted in ways that mythologized the peasant lifestyle in

59 Buzard, 18-19. 60 Lübbren, 1. 16 order to support modern urban bourgeois values such as femininity and domesticity. 1 argue however, that McNicoll denies these typical depictions: considered in context, her paintings of rural women workers take on an overtly feminist position.

Underlying these discussions will be the question of "the difference that gender makes.,,61 Michael Bell, in the foreword to the catalogue of one of the few exhibitions of

Canadian women's art says that "[o]ne does not like to make the distinction that an artist is male or female.'>62 This, while arguably optimistic, is a deeply flawed statement.

Feminist art historians have shown repeatedly that "the distinction of sex" is crucial in art production: pioneering scholars Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock have said that "any argument that proposes 'art has no sex' ignores the difference of men' sand women' s experience of the social structures of class and the sexual division within our society, and

its historically varied effects on the art men and women produce.'>63 Women like Helen

McNicoll working at the turn of the twentieth century, white slowly making inroads into

the art world, were restricted in terms of the subjects and spaces they could paint, and

were limited in terms of the education and exhibition opportunities avait able to them. If

they managed to gain recognition against these odds, as McNicoll did, they came into

conflict with a modernist art historical tradition that labelled their work "feminine" (and

therefore unmodern and uninteresting) and erased it from the canon. So, white the writer

of McNicoll' s obituary for Saturday Night could report that she was "one of the most

profoundly original and technically accompli shed of Canadian artists ... Possessed of an

aggressive and active intellect ... Miss McNicoll was no amateur-there are indeed few

61 Huneault, 215. 62 Farr and Luckyj, vii. 63 Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Otd Mistresses: Women, Art, and [de%gy (London, Sydney, and Wellington: Pandora, 1981),48. 17 painters in the Dominion who take their art as seriously as she did,'~ it now falls upon the twenty-first century art historian to recover this reputation, and re-position McNicoIl as the successful, independent, and ultimately modern artist she was once known to be.

Such an action will not simply reinstate McNicoIl into the canons of Canadian art and modernist art history, but, by questioning the definitions of concepts like 'modernity' and

'femininity,' and exposing their gender, class, racial, and geographical biases, work towards dismantling the canon altogether.

64 UA Loss to Canadian Art" 18

CHAPTER 1

SITES OF PRODUCTION: HELEN McNICOLL AND THE RURAL ARTIST COLONY

ln 1905, Helen McNicoll travelled to St. Ives, Cornwall to enroll in Julius

Olsson's School of Landscape and Sea Painting. l Although textual records of her travels are scarce, it may be here that she painted many of her images of girls and women in fields, on cliffs, and on the beach. Although the se images have been labelled quaint, innocent, and nostalgie, 1 contend that the images that McNicoll painted while at St. Ives refIect a practice that places the artist firmly within the realm of the modem: tourism. 1 intend to draw upon the idea that tourism is "the paradigmatic mode of modernity;'02 this approach, as Nina Lübbren states, "enables us to gain an insight into ways of being modem that are not identified with being modernist."3 A case study of the rural artist colony at St. Ives, and Helen McNicoll's experience there, provides an excellent way of entering into this discussion. 1 also wish to introduce the potential for feminist scholarship concerning the rural art colony. 1 hope to show that these communities gave women like McNicoll the opportunity to work independently, and provided women artists with a ready-made network of support. A close examination of Helen McNicoll' s Under the Shadow of the Tent (fig. 2), which won the Women's Art Society prize in 1914, will illustrate these ideas. ***

1 Natalie Luckyj, Helen McNïcoll: A Canadian Impressionist (Toronto: AGO, 1999),42. 2 Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888-1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 10. l Nina Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies in Europe, 1870-1910 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 12. 19

Rural artists' colonies have been neglected in art historical scholarship, and art produced at these sites dismissed as conservative, and therefore, uninteresting. The subject is generally dealt with only as it pertains to the work of great modernist

"masters," in terms of individual histories of particular locations, or within comparative anecdotal studies.4 These are fairly traditional methods that tend to encourage a certain mythology. Often present is the idea that artist colonies originated as outposts of rebellious youth,S but slowly evolved into sites that "lived largely off their reputation for being enclaves of Bohemia and can certainly not he seen to form part of any major artistic movement.,,(j In most discussions of rural artists' colonies, a major male artist is seen as the centre of this action: Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven, Claude Monet (1840-1926) at Giverny, and Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947) at Newlyn are perhaps the most prominent examples. These ways of looking at the rural art colony phenomenon are insufficient: they erase the presence of women artists, contradict the collective nature of the colony, and do not account for the size and scale of the trend, the diversity of styles, and the interesting and potentially problematic social issues that arise in its history.

Nina Lübbren's recent Rural Artists' Colonies in Europe, 1870-1910 (2001) is the first major study to turn a critical eye on the subject, examining the growth of the art colony phenomenon as a major movement within artistic practice at the turn of the twentieth century, white acknowledging that the modernist preference for urban subjects

"has resulted in the priviteged study of the French Impressionists and their followers and

4 See, for example, for the first category, Caroline Fox, Stanhope Forbes and the Newlyn School (Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1993); for the second, Marion Whybrow, St. Ives, 1883-1993: Portrait olan Art Colony (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Antique Collectors' Club, 1994); and for the third, Michael Jacobs, The Good and Simple Lile: Artists Colonies in Europe and America (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985) or Steve Shipp, American Art Colonies, 1850-1930: A Historical Guide to America's Original Art Colonies and their Artists (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1996). s Jacobs, 10. 6 Jacobs, 16. 20 a marked neglect of anything else.'>1 Rural artist colonies evolved within the bounds of the plein-air movement, one of the most-if not the most-widespread artistic trends of the nineteenth century.8 In spite of its popularity, there has been a marked lack of scholarly interest: because these representations of rural subjects do not directly reference obvious signs of modernity (e.g. city streets, bars, concert halls), they have been forgotten in academic criticism. Plein-airism also conflicts with the way that art history has been

written. Michael Jacobs notes that the neglect of these artists and paintings may be explained partly by the fact that the plein-air movement does not fit neatly into the teleologicaI progression of the history of art. As part of an international trend that

combined sorne of the interests of the Romantic period (the celebration of nature, theories

of the picturesque and sublime), with contemporary stylistic developments (such as

Impressionism), plein-air painters are not easily categorized according to the traditional

periodization of art history.9

The formation of rural artist colonies was significantly more than a footnote to

modernist art history. Painters aIl over Europe and North America moved their studios

outside, "relocat[ing] in the melée, in the accidentaI circumstances of life.,,10 Lübbren

notes that between 1830 and 1910, over three thousand artists were documented as

having been practicing in rural artists' colonies in eleven countries across Europe

(including Germany, France, the Netherlands, and England).ll These colonies varied in

7 Nina Lübbren, "'Toilers of the Sea:' Fisherfolk and the Geographies of Tourism in England, 1880-1900," in The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880-1940, ed. David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt, and Fiona Russell, 29-63 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 32. 8 Jacobs, 7. 9 Jacobs, 12-16. 10 Kenneth McConkey, British lmpressionism (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989),49. 11 Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 1. See Appendix for maps showing the extent of the movement. The United States saw an equivalent growth in art colonies in the last half of the nineteenth century and first 21 size, artist nationality and gender, and general character. The artist colony attracted painters for many reasons: the quiet countryside provided a welcome diversion to industrialization and urbanization, and a buHt-in infrastructure for socializing, criticism, and shop talk among colleagues. There were also pragmatic concerns-cheap living conditions (rent, food, materials), readily available models and subject matter-that made the artist colony an inviting professional choice. 12

Helen McNicoll's experience reflects these trends. It appears that McNicoll worked at several artist colonies: in addition to time spent in Italy, Brittany, and Grèz-

sur-Loing,13 one of her few letters mentions an upcoming trip to Walberswick, an artist colony on the east coast of England/4 another is written from Yorkshire in the summer of

1913.15 The second letter provides an excellent account of life and work at an artist colony. She writes to her father about buying art supplies, painting the lilies outside the hou se where she has rented a room, and walking the countryside in search of subject

matter. Her comments reveal many of the trends apparent at other art colonies, noting the

cornfortable, cheap lodgings, the delicious local bakery, and the other artists: "A lot of

artists have stopped here at one time or another, and Miss Fowsey said that they were

talking of Mr. Brymner just before we came.,,16 McNicoll has pinpointed many

decade of the twentieth. In American Art Colonies, 1850-1930, Steve Shipp examines colonies in such diverse states as New York, Connecticut, New Mexico, and California. Like their European counterparts, the American colonies attracted art celebrities of the period: Childe Hassam (1859-1935) worked at East Hampton, NY, Frederic Church (1826-1900) and Thomas Cole (1801-1848) painted at North Conway, NH, and, perhaps most famously, Georgia O'Keefe (1887-1986) at Taos, NM. 12 Jacobs, 12; Shipp, x. 13 Luckyj, 42. 14 Helen McNicoll to unknown recpient, date unknown, possibly early 1907. Artists' Files, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON. For more on Walberswick, see Richard Scott, Artists at Walberswick: East Anglian Interludes, 1880-2000 (Bristol: Art Dictionaries, Ltd, 2002). 15 Helen McNicoll to David McNicoll, 20 July 1913. Artists' Files, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON. This letter also confirms a previous trip: "for this is where 1 came to join Dolly just after they left St Ives." 16 She is referring to William Brymner, her former teacher at the AAM. 22 characteristics of the typical rural artist colony: the availability of cheap housing, interaction with the locals, living within a community of artists, the internationalism of

such a community, and the availability of rural outdoor subject matter. She also alludes to the class and culture difference between visitor and local at the site of the rural artist

colony:

When Dolly told sorne old woman that we were going to the Fowseys, she said­ oh ye will be very comfortable there you will have t'young lassies to wait upon you. l'young lassie' (Miss Fowsey) who waits upon us is over fifty and wears large green glasses. But they are ail pretty much the same in that they like to stop and gossip. And we have to pass through the kitchen to the [1] unless we squeeze ourselves through the small window into the garden and then out by way of the gate. We often do that when the Fowseys are having their meals. How they manage to live in such a tiny kitchen and house 1 cannot imagine. And how they make any profit making lemon cheese cakes for a 1/2 d is another thing 1 wonder at. *** Like her colleagues, Helen McNicoll spent time at different colonies, travelling

around the countryside and across the Channel in search of community and subject

matter. In this chapter, 1 will focus on her time at St. Ives. St. Ives was the largest and

best known of the places she visited, and, 1 posit, can perhaps be seen as representative of

her experience at other colonies.

Although very little has been written about them, the most important British

colonies were Newlyn and St. Ives, both in the southwest region of Cornwall. 17 Nina

Lübbren states, "Between 1870 and 1910, coastal Cornwall became the most painted

region of Britain outside London.,,18 And no wonder: art critic and early feminist activist

17 Newlyn has 73 artists recorded between 1870 and 1910; St. Ives, 106 (Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 171-73). Other popular British art colonies included Brig O'Turk and Cockburnspath in Scotland, and Staithes in Yorkshire (Jacobs, 6). 18 Lübbren, "Toilers of the Sea," 29. 23

Alice Meynell writes, "St. Ives stands by this visionary northem water, a little town so hilly and so jostled together that it is almost bound with col our. ,,19

St. Ives was distinguished from Newlyn by the founding of the St. Ives Arts Club in 1890.20 Founded informally by several artists living at St. Ives, it "provided a permanent gathering place for the painters to retum to from their travels and seek the company of like minds, to exchange opinions on the state of the art, and to entertain visiting artists.,,21 The SIAC served to stabilize the art colony at St. Ives and make it more permanent than many other colonies across Europe. By the 1940s and 50s, St. Ives was at the forefront of British modemism, and home to artists such as Barbara Hepworth (1903-

1975) and Ben Nicholson (1894-1982).22 The SIAC is still in existence today, and St. Ives remains a very popular destination: Jacobs notes that its population triples in the

summertime, its shops, hotels, and galleries full of artists and tourists.23 The Tate St. Ives opened its doors in 1993, commemorating one hundred years of artistic activity in the

town.

Unfortunately, art historicalliterature has privileged the later years at St. Ives,

leaving a dearth of research on the pre-WWI years of the colony. 24 This era has been

19 Alice Meynell, "Newlyn," The Art Journal 9 (1889): 97. 20 There were other distinct differences between St. Ives and Newlyn. St. Ives was, from the beginning, known for its international population, while Newlyn was essentially an English colony (Tom Cross, The Shining Sands: Artists in Newlyn and St. Ives, 1880-1930 (Tiverton, Devon: Westcountry Books, 1994), 12; Jacobs, 144). Nina Lübbren's statistics bear this out: she finds that Newlyn was 94% British, while St. Ives was only 51 % British (Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 171-73). Newlyn was also known for attracting figure painters; St. Ives, landscapists (Jacobs, 153; Whybrow, 32; W. Christian Symons, "Newlyn and the Newlyn School," Magazine of Art, 1890,204). 21 Whybrow, 21. 22 Cross, The Shining Sands, 12-13. 23 Jacobs, 165~66. 24 There have been several publications in the last quarter century concerning St. Ives. They are overwhelmingly focused on the post-WWI period. See, for example, David Brown, Painting in Cornwall, 1945-1955 (London: New Arts Centre, 1977); Tom Cross, Painting the Warmth of the Sun: St. Ives Artists, 1939-1975 (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 1995); Peter Davies, The St. Ives Years: Essays on the Growth ofan Artistic Phenomenon (Wimborne, Dorset: The Wimborne Bookshop, 1984); St. Ives, 1939- 24 written out of the canons of art history because of its seemingly un-avant-garde approach to art-making: compared to the abstract sculpture and painting which later dominated St.

Ives, Helen McNicoll's paintings of the seaside do seem sweetly old-fashioned. However,

1 contend that St. Ives, and the artistic activity occurring there, can and should be understood through the lens of tourism, a fundamentally modern practice.

***

Theories of travel and tourism have flourished in the past quarter century. The most influential of these studies is Dean MacCannell 's The Tourist, first published in

1976. MacCannell contends that "the empirical and ideological expansion of modern society to be intimately linked in diverse ways to modern mass leisure, especially to international tourism and sightseeing."25 John Urry agrees: in his The Tourist Gaze

(1990), he states, "to be a tourist is one of the characteristics of the modern experience.,,26

White tourism has a long history-from travel in the Roman Empire, to Christian pitgrimage, to the Grand Tour-it is in the nineteenth century that the practice as conceived as a leisure activity accessible to broad segments of the population begins to flourish.27 The introduction of train travel in the second half of the nineteenth century

"democratized" travel, expanding the opportunity for mobility from the exclusive realm

1964: Twenty-Five Years of Painting, Sculpture. and Pottery (London: Tate Gallery, 1985). Nedira Yakir has shown that the gender biases of modernist art history persist in this context. For a discussion of the marginalization of women artists who worked at St Ives during these years, see Nadira Yakir, "Cornubia: Gender, Geography, and Genealogy in St. Ives Modernism," in Women Artists and Modernism, ed. Katy Deepwell, 112-128 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998). R1 25 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 3 ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999),3. 26 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2"d ed. (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002),4. 27 Urry, 4. 25 of the upper classes to the ever-growing middle class.28 The reasons for tourism's development at this time were diverse: industrialization, and ail of its attending factors- population growth, urbanization, transportation improvements, middle class wealth-was primary among them. Aiso essential, particularly in terms of the rural artist colony, was the legacy of Romanticism, with its sentimental attitude towards nature.29

The increased accessibility of tourism simultaneously caused a shift in the goals and ways of discussing travel. ''Tourist'' became a pejorative term, signifying a traveller who only appreciated his new surroundings in a superficial, scripted manner. The upper classes distinguished themselves from the hordes by claiming the status of "traveller," seeking authenticity in their experiences, and aiming to see and live the "real" lives of the people and places they visited. Rather than adhering to a hierarchy based strictly on class

(though this was obviously still extant), travellers were thus privileged by education, morality, and taste. 30 James Buzard refers to this new practice as "anti-tourism."31 This mindset frames the attitude of many residents of the rural artist colony at the tum of the twentieth century. ***

28 Urry, 16-17. "Democratized" is, of course, a relative term. Many scholars have acknowledged that travel and tourism, then as now, are regulated by gender, class, and race: "the traveller, by definition, is someone who has the security and privilege to move about in reatively unconstrained ways. This, at any rate, is the travel myth" (James Clifford, "Travelling Cultures," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 96-116 [New York and London: Routledge, 1992], 107). White others May move through geographic space-migrant workers, immigrants, or refugees, for example-it is crucial to recognize the extent "that certain travellers are materially privileged, others oppressed" (Clifford, 100). While tourism in the nineteenth century was accessible to a greater number of people than ever before, it was not universal by any means. For further discussion, see Clifford. 29 James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 18-19; Urry, 20. 30 Buzard, 5-7. 31 Buzard, 5. 26

The relationship between tourism and art is obvious, but underresearched. Nina

Lübbren argues that an understanding of tourism is essential in understanding much late- nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art, and furthermore, "may provide a useful corrective to art history's insistent bias for chronology by counterbalancing an attention to geography and changes in place.,,32 1 would argue, in accordance with Lübbren, that it

is an ideal way of understanding a rural artist colony such as St. Ives and its position in

the modern world. Artists-usually from metropolitan centres Iike London and Paris-

travelled to the countryside to paint unfamiliar sights. Espousing the modern attitude of

anti-tourism, they often Iived among the locals, renting rooms in residents' homes,

studios in fishing lofts, and painting fishermen and farmers going about their everyday

lives and work. In an address to the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society of Falmouth,

artist Stanhope Forbes says, "it may seem somewhat of a paradox, but 1 have often found

the success of the picture to be in inverse ratio to the degree of comfort in which it has

been produced. ,033 This suggests that the artists who went to work at colonies were in

search of some kind of authentic experience, and may not have believed that they were

tourists at ail.

However, the evidence suggests otherwise. The sheer number of lei sure activities

that appeared in St. Ives when artists began to arrive in droves suggests that Iife in an

artist colony was not excIusively dedicated to art. Aside from offering one another artistic

criticism and support, the Newlyn and St. Ives artists formed a cricket league in 1886?4

32 Nina Ltibbren, "North to South: Paradigm Shifts in European Art and Tourism, 1880-1920," in Visual Culture and Tourism, ed. David Crouch and Nina Lübbren, 125-146 (Oxford: Berg, 2003),129. 33 Mrs. Lionel Birch, Stanhope A. Forbes, ARA and Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes, ARWS (London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne: Cassell and Company, 1906),29. 34 Jacobs, 154-55. 27

By the mid-1880s, the town offered annual sailing and swimming contests, lawn tennis, archery, golf, masquerade balls, dancing, singing, and acting nights.35

The principal sign of tourism in Cornwall was the railway. The train was integral in the development of artist colonies across Europe, allowing fast and comfortable access to relatively untouched land.36 Train travel to Cornwall began in 1859 when a railway bridge was constructed over the River Tamar allowing people to easily travel to the

southwest region of the country for the first time.37 Tourism in St. Ives began when the town was connected to Penzance by rail in 1877. In that year, the area newspaper, The

Western Echo, acknowledged the potential economic benefits of a thriving tourist

industry;38 the first hotel-a Great Western Railway hotel called the Treglenna Castle­ f~llowed the next year.39

This great impetus for travel, however, is almost never depicted in the

paintings produced at St. Ives.40 Nina Lübbren argues that this kind of conspicuous

absence is one of the key ways that modernism is felt in rural paintings.41 James Clifford

has also discussed this phenomenon in terms of anthropology and ethnography. Of the

practice of fieldwork, Clifford says the "boundary areas" between home and field are

often erased: there is no mention of the means of transportation, of the translation often

required, of the people, places, and things one passes on the way to the site in question, or

3S Cross, The Shining Sands, 89-90; Jacobs, 155-56; Whybrow, 33-34. 36 Jacobs, 12. The development of artist colonies in the United States was also Iinked to the building of the railroad. Provincetown, on Cape Cod, grew up after the town was Iinked to Boston by railway; train distance from New York was a key factor in the development of colonies Iike Old Lyme and Cos Cob in Connecticut, and East Hampton in New York (Shipp xii-xiii). 37 Cross, The Shining Sands, Il. 38 Whybrow, 25. 39 Cross, The Shining Sands, Il. 40 A significant exception is The Passing Train (c. 1890) (fig. 18), by Marianne Preindlsberger-Stokes (1855-1927). See Chapter 3 for fuether discussion. 41 Lübbren, "Toilers of the Sea," 31-32. 28 of the home of the researcher. These things are removed in the service of an "objective" study. This is, of course, a biased presentation of reality: "generally speaking, what's elided is the wider global world of intercultural import-export in which the ethnographie encounter is always already enmeshed.,,42

The railway was not the only thing left out of images. Nina Lübbren states,

Modernity was (and is) not only to be experienced in cities but also in non-urban areas. Modernisation left its mark on ail geographic locations. This had direct economic consequences for fishing villages, as traditional fishing was replaced by new industries such as mining (as at Staithes), by modern fishing practices (as at Newlyn), or by tourist related enterprises (as at St. Ives).43

However, there are very few depictions of hotels, restaurants, or other sites of the nascent

service industry in paintings from St. Ives. Images that depict the beach do not show the crowds, and paintings done from the tops of cliffs selectively look out towards the ocean

rather than back at the town. These absences reveal the anti-tourist attitude of many

artists: by erasing the obvious presence of the modern in these rural villages, artists

attempted to construct a timeless, romanticized site, which only they, as seekers of

authentic culture, were privileged enough to understand.

We know, however, that tourism in St. Ives was not a one-way relationship. In

spite of what images would have the viewer believe, the town changed significantly upon

the arrivai of masses of tourists and artists. Marion Whybrow explains,

It seems certain that so large a group of people descending on a town, bringing their wealth and needs with them, played a significant role in refloating the economy of a town whose mining and fishing industries were fast disappearing. The townsfolk supplied services to the artists, from studios, models, shops, accommodation, housekeepers, maids, cooks, and every form of necessary requirement for living.44

42 Clifford, 100. 43 Lübbren, "Toilers of the Sea," 52. 44 Whybrow, 25-26. 29

St. Ives local James Lanham, for example, benefitted greatly from the burgeoning tourist industry. From owning the town's general store, he went on to sell art supplies, rent studio space, frame canvases, and open an art gallery.45 On a smaller scale, townspeople could make extra income by renting out rooms to visitors, and lofts and warehouses for use as studios: at the peak of St. Ives's popularity, over one hundred venues were converted into artists' workspaces.46 The artist-tourists who came to St. Ives considered their presence a positive thing for the community: contemporary W.H. Bartlett writes:

Artists, always pretty numerous, are, 1 think, very welcome to the fisherfolk, and the superannuated old salts who sit and sun themselves on the old benches lament exceedingly if the usual number of 'sketchers' shows any signs of falling off. The painters, indeed provide them with food for conversation as weil as for the eye.47

The art world came to Cornwall as weil. Alice Meynell praised the opening of the new exhibition hall in Penzance: "[N]o central institution could show Art in more sensitive touch with what is advanced and liberal.'048 James Lanham's gallery opened in

1887; followed bya gallery in Newlyn in 1895. These spaces were built explicitly for the purpose of exhibiting art by living "local" artists.49 There was also a Show Day held annually in St. Ives, founded with the goal of allowing the townspeople to visit studios and see the work destined for the RA. Show Day quickly became in itself a tourist attraction, with the railway running extra trains for the occasion.5O Bartlett also notes the amateur art criticism that occurred in the town: "[O]ne very advanced impressionist creat[ed] an idea among these local art cri tics that, as his productions were quite

4S Whybrow, 38-39. Helen McNicoll's partner Dorothea Sharp managed this gallery with artist Marcella Smith (1916-1940) later in life (Whybrow, 93). 46 Whybrow, 10. 47 W.H. Bartlett, "Summer Time at St. Ives, Cornwall," The Art Journal, 1897,293. 48 Meynell, "Newlyn," 142. 49 Cross, The Shining Sands, 125-26. 50 Cross, The Shining Sands, 153; Whybrow, 36. 30 unintelligible, he must be a little queer in the head; also, sundry details connected with his get-up and his methods generally were ail considered strong evidence for his want of sanity.,,51

Nevertheless, the vast majority of artists were painting with the intent of exhibiting for, and selling to, an audience in London (or another metropolitan centre).

Most were (ideally) destined for the RA Spring Exhibition. By the 1890s specialty exhibitions were also popular: Bond Street gallery owner Walter Dowdeswell showed

"An Exhibition of Pictures by Artists residing in or painting at Newlyn, St. Ives,

Falmouth, etc ... in Cornwall" in 1890, and "Fisheries" in 1893; Nottingham Castle

Museum and Art Gallery held "Cornish Painters of Newlyn, St. Ives, and Falmouth" with over two hundred works in 1894; and an exhibit at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1902 celebrated fifty years of painting in Cornwall.52

By the turn of the century, Londoners felt they knew St. Ives and the rest of

Cornwall intimately.53 It was regularly represented in similar ways-the same colours, the same sights. Artists had created a powerful image of the place for people who hadn 't ever been there. We may discuss this idea in terms of Rob Shields's theorization of what he calls the place-myth. For Shields, places are socially constructed: when a place has enough images/ideas created about it, coming from "idiosyncratic associations and

individual experiences,,,54 it may become widely understood as a place-myth. These are further disseminated through representation: Shields discusses advertising and

SI Bartlett, 293-94. S2 Cross, The Shining Sands, 117-19. 53 W.H. Bartlett recounts, "one fine oid type of fisherman had been painted by so many of the annuai visitors that he was firmly convinced that in the event of his coming to London he was certain to be recognized" (294). 54 Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1991),61. 31 propaganda, but we may certainly include painting in this discussion.55 Norman Silvester, writing in the Bulletin of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum (located in the competing seaside resort town of Bournemouth), certainly recognized the potential of images in this arena. In his short discussion of the gallery's acquisition of Dorothea

Sharp's painting A Cornish Holiday (date unknown) he writes:

Hourly, we anticipate a protest from the publicity committee that we are advertising the pleasure of a vacation spot in Cornwall. Our answer to this must be that if this body commissioned Miss Sharp to paint the glories of our golden sands, and our equitinted cliffs, more would join the crowd to see the reality, and sorne mightjourney far to see the original.S6

Sharp, in addition to portraying an existing place-myth-the beautiful sun and sands of

Cornwall-has also contributed to the construction of such a myth.

Artists' images functioned as publicity for the art colony, and encouraged the

growth of the tourist industry even further.57 Ironically, the artists wanted to keep St. Ives

(and the rest of Cornwall) for themselves:

Although St. Ives is no doubt gradually extending its summer clientele, still it is to be hoped its increasing prosperity will not detract from its old-world charm, and that no speculative townsman will become ambitious to suppl Y the town with a pier and other up-to-date advantages. To put it on low grounds, its old-worldness will have an ever-increasing value as years roll on. 58

Here Bartlett voices the "anti-tourist" sentiment discussed by Buzard. White artists at St.

Ives certainly behaved like tourists, it seems that they thought of themselves as seekers of

an authentic way of life, not tourists who walked on boardwalks and followed

guide books.

5S Shields, 60-62. The Great Western Railway company enlisted severa! artists working in St. Ives to create their publicity posters. These included Forbes, Julius OIsson, and Adrian Stokes (1854-1935) (Whybrow, 67-68). 56 Norman L. Silvester, "Dorothea Sharp, ROI, RBA," Bulletin of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum 15, no. 3 (September 1936): 34. 57 Cross, The Shining Sands, 128; Whybrow, 36-37. 58 Bartlett, 294-95. 32

*** It is into this history that Helen McNicoll' s paintings can and should be read.

While Kristina Huneault questions whether McNicoll' s hearing disability would have caused a "detachment from social discourse,,,59 it appears that she did participate fully in the rural art colony lifestyle at St. Ives: she attended a popular art school, visited the

SIAC, rented a studio in the village, and painted many typical depictions of the town and surrounding area. The textual evidence, although seanty , supports the argument that

McNicoll adapted weil to this environment. One letter implies that she was friendly with her teacher Algernon Talmage, remarking that she purchased a painting for herself on her birthday from the senior artist for five pounds: "1 could hardly thank him for it was really a gift. 1 found out afterwards that he was asking ten pounds for it. ,>60 The SIAC visitors list records a "Miss McNicoll" from Montreal, signed in by member R. Holmes Hunt in

May of that year.61 Finally, a photograph of the artist in her studio (fig. 3) shows that

McNicoll, like her colleagues, rented a fish loft or warehouse as her workspace.

Unfortunately, because of the paucity of evidence on McNicoll's time in St. Ives, we must look to her contemporaries there-fellow Canadians Emily Carr (1871-1945) and

Elizabeth Armstrong-Forbes, among others-to extrapolate what her experience might have been like.

As previously mentioned, McNicoll traveled to St. Ives in 1905 to attend Julius

Olsson' s School of Landscape and Sea Painting. Olsson opened the school with Louis

Grier (1864-1920) in 1895, with the express interest in giving students the opportunity to

59 Kristina Huneault, "Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoII," Art History 27, no. 2 (April 2004): 226. 60 McNicoII, 1907. 61 Whybrow, 215. 33 work outside. In 1904, Algernon Talmage took over for Grier, splitting the teaching time with 01sson.62 Emily Carr's autobiography, Growing Pains, gives an account of the school (and of St. Ives in general). She repeatedly emphasizes the amount of work involved: when asked by another hotel guest whether she was at St. Ives to work or go to parties, and responded work, she was recommended to go to Olsson's-"he'll work you to the last gasp!'063 She is vaguely shocked by the independence of the work, being left alone to paint among the fishermen on the beach, having to work standing up, and made to carry all of her equipment around the town and countryside.64 Work started at eight in the morning and carried on until dusk, always outside, "except during hurricanes. ,,65

Carr preferred Talmage as a teacher to Olsson; the latter, she writes, treated "the boy students" differently.661t may still be said that Olsson's school was relatively well- advanced concerning women artists like Carr and McNicoll. The school advertisements were for "students adopting painting as a profession,"67 and women were seemingly given all of the same independence and advantages as the men. It was likewise at the SIAC, where women were invited to join after just a few meetings: Louis Grier, discussing the founding of the club in The Studio, writes,

After a few meetings sorne judged it rather slow ... at the third or fourth 'club night,' one member, bol der than the rest, and possibly possessing more of the spirit of the gambier, dropped a boit from the blue by proposing the introduction of lady members; and so persuasive was his manner, that we were speedily won over and his motion was carried almost without opposition.68

62 Cross, The Shining Sands, 142-43; Whybrow, 58. 63 Emily Carr, Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr (Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, and Company, 1946), 166. 64 Carr, 166-67. She was not alone in her surprise: art critic andjoumalist Charles Lewis Hind wrote that "a painter must be something of an athlete, and hardy to carry a six foot canvas around the hills, morning after morning in the nipping air of daybreak!" (Whybrow, 22). 6S Carr, 168. 66 Carr, 171. 67 Whybrow, 58. 68 Louis Grier, "A Painter's Club," The Studio 5 (1895): 110. 34

By the time McNicoll was in St. Ives, women were full members of the club, with ail of the same privileges as the men. This is remarkable, because as at Olsson's school, the club was specifically only open to "professional" artists. 69 It suggests that here, if not in

London, women were readily seen as professionals and treated on a (relatively) equal basis.

However, the biases of art history continue in this context. Many women practiced art in St. Ives-16% of recorded artists there were women, 18% at Newlyn- but few are known to us today. The numbers were similar, if not higher, at other colonies:

Lübbren's records show that the composition of sites such as Giverny and Grèz-sur-

Loing (in France), Dachau (in Germany), and Laren (in the Netherlands) were aIl between 15 and 20% women. Worpswede and Ahrenshoop in Germany were close to

40% women, and women formed almost half the population of the colony at Egmond aan

Zee in the Netherlands.70 Lübbren also acknowledges that her statistics are "skewed" because of the lack of research on women artists, and that these figures may be much

higher.71 The presence of women was noted by contemporaries in ways that suggest

women formed a large part of the artistic community at St. Ives: Stanhope Forbes wrote

that women artists, coming from the South Kensington Schools and the Slade for the

summer, "cover the beach at low tide.,,72 The town newspaper remarks upon the ubiquity

of women, saying that their easels are "like shells,m on the beach.

69 Whybrow, 28-29. 70 LUbbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 165-77. 71 Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 2. 72 Jacobs, 151. 73 Jacobs, 151. 35

Although there were obviously talented and well-known women artists working at

St. Ives, little is known about them unless their husbands were painters as weil, as was the case with artists such as Marianne Preindlsberger-Stokes, Elizabeth Armstrong-

Forbes, and Laura Knighe4 The dearth of research on them remains the case even when the woman outshone her husband: the Swedish painter Emma Lowstadt-Chadwick (1855-

1932), married to American artist Frank Chadwick (1850-1942), won a medal in the Paris

Salon of 1887 and was well-known for being "the more talented of the two... 75 Knight was, and is, much better known than her husband Harold Knight (1874-1961), but is still not a household name.'6

This void in art historical scholarship is a creation of the twentieth century. Many of the women working in St. Ives and Newlyn were well-known in their time.

Preindlsberger-Stokes, an Austrian artist who worked at St Ives with her husband, painter Adrian Stokes, was popular in Britain during her lifetime, exhibiting widely and celebrated in several art journals. 77 Armstrong-Forbes worked in London, Munich,

France, and St. Ives before marrying Stanhope Forbes and settling in Newlyn. Mrs.

Lionel Birch, in her biography of the couple, saw fit to emphasize her independent

74 Whybrow, 64. 7S Jacobs, 154. 76 The most famous visitor to St Ives in this early period, however, was a woman. Virginia Woolf (1882- 1941) and her sister, Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) were at least partly raised in St Ives, and their father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was the first president of the SIAC in 1891 (Whybrow, 19). The setting of Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse (1927) is acknowledged as being based on St. Ives (Eudora Welty, foreword to To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1927, foreword 1981), and one of the main characters-Lily Briscoe-is a pain ter. Woolf and Bell were resident in St. Ives in 1905 (Whybrow, 61) when Helen McNicoIl was there: between this experience and the fact that they lived in the same neighbourhood in London, it is interesting to speculate whether they would have known each another, or of each other's work. For more on Woolf and Bell's time at St. Ives, see Marion Dell and Marion Whybrow, Virginia Woolfand Vanessa Bell: Remembering St. Ives (Padstow, Cornwall: Tabb House, 2004). 77 See, for example, Harriet Ford, "The Work of Mrs. Adrian Stokes," The Studio 19 (1900); Alice Meynell, "Mrs. Adrian Stokes," Magazine of Art 24 (1901); Wilfred MeyneIl, "Mr. and Mrs. Adrian Stokes," The Art Journal, 1900). 36 successes: an education at the South Kensington Schools and the Art Students' League in

New York, an extensive exhibition history, and her art and travel writing.78 Both of these women were celebrated on their own terms: not once does Birch refer to Armstrong-

Forbes' s work as "feminine." Harriet Ford goes out of her way to tell the reader that

Preindlsberger-Stokes's works are "full of ingenuity, of resources, delighting in ail delicate and dainty means of expressing the thought, she yet never descends to triviality, to mere 'prettiness. ",79 ln stark contrast, modemist art history has dismissed these women as unimportant, essentially feminine painters: late-twentieth-century writer Tom Cross writes of Armstrong-Forbes, "she chose to depict the domestic side of village Iife to which she naturally responded.',go Caroline Fox, writing in 1993, devotes a short chapter to her Iife and work, but concurs: "Elizabeth Armstrong ... was one of the most talented and interesting of the Newlyn artists, and her very feminine sensitivity and Iightness of touch contrasts her husband's more solid approach.,,81 Marianne Prendlsberger-Stokes has been ail but forgotten. *** Counter to this historical revision, 1 propose that the rural art colony provided a

site for an independent women' s art practice. One of the main obstacles facing women

wishing to become art professionals was marriage, which does not seem to be as much of

an issue within the community of an artist colony. Although sorne women abandoned

their painting when the duties of marri age and family took over, many did not: Laura

78 Birch, 57-74. 79 Ford, 156. 80 Cross, The Shining Sands, 82. 81 Caroline Fox, Stanhope Forbes and the Newlyn School, 43. For a more extensive discussion of Armstrong-Forbes, see Judith Cook and Melissa Hardie, Singingfrom the Walls: The Life and Art of Elizabeth Forbes (Clifton, Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2000). 37

Knight grew more famous after her marriage; Marianne Prendlsberger-Stokes was treated as an equal in contemporary articles such as Wilfred Meynell's "Mr. and Mrs. Stokes;" and Elizabeth Armstrong-Forbes continued to paint, exhibit, write, and illustrate articles, and even co-ran the painting school she and Forbes founded in Newlyn. Still other women, McNicoll included, remained unmarried and travelled with other women, or rented rooms and studios al one.

It is also important to recognize the role of the artist colony in providing an artistic community for women. As previously noted, the primary characteristic of the artist colony was its collective nature: 1 would argue that this kind of community was important for women artists of the period. Life in a rural artist colony made female artists visible, to both other women artists, and to the art world as a whole. The works of Laura

Knight and Marianne Prendlsberger-Stokes were exhibited both locally and in London, and both women were written about in the most popular artjournals of the day. Elizabeth

Armstrong-Forbes's influence over the artistic community became official when she and

Forbes founded an art school in Newlyn. Friendships developed between women:

McNicoll met her partner Dorothea Sharp at St. Ives.

Under the Shadaw a/the Tent (fig. 2), painted by McNicoll in 1914, provides

pictorial evidence for an extensive network of women's artistic practice at rural artists'

colonies. Celebrated upon its exhibition at the RBA as "[a] very easy and sure piece of

painting,,,S2 the image depicts two women sitting on a beach. One is looking at a book;

the other holds a box on her legs. This is an image of artistic production: the box holds

the woman's painting materials and she wears a smock; the reading woman is looking at

82 W.R., "Round the Galleries," London Sunday Times, November 2,1913,23. 38 a sketchbook (it is clear that there are images on the pages, not words). This is an image

of the women who "cover the beach at low tide," whose easels are like "shells" on the

beach. These artists, though, seem to be better described by Kenneth McConkey, who

writes, "Whilst it may seem that painters sat down in sunlight, un der white sketching

umbrellas in a holiday mood, they nevertheless went hard at it in circumstances which

were conducive to keen competition.,,83 Although the "white sketching umbrella" is

present in the form of a tent, these women are treated with great seriousness. They are

absorbed in their work, and do not acknowledge each another, or the viewer. The

painting's relatively large size encourages the viewer to read the women's artistic activity

as important.

Under the Shadow o/the Tent is also an image offemale partnership and

friendship, reflective of the community offered by life at a rural artist colony such as St.

Ives. The circumstances of the painting's production also demonstrate this atmosphere.

Natalie Luckyj writes,

Women who chose plein-air painting, which required working in public spaces, found the companionship of working together a social necessity to preserve respectability, since the conventions of female decorum clashed with the requirements of the artist. Setting up her easel on a beach (only to be quickly surrounded by curious onlookers) ... presented particular difficulties for the unaccompanied painter.

As such, women artists who painted together often painted the same subjects. Dorothea

Sharp's version of Under the Shadow o/the Tent, entitled On the Beach (fig. 4), depicts

the same subject matter, in a remarkably similar fashion. 84 Sharp's brushstrokes are

looser and the painting seems less finished-this fact, as weil as the small scale of the

image, suggests that this may only be a preliminary sketch. The most interesting

83 McConkey, British lmpressionism, 49. 84 See McNicoll's ln the Tent (1914) for yet another version of the same scene. 39 difference between the canvases is Sharp's inclusion of an indication of an easel, making the theme of art-making very clear. These two paintings, read together, provide an even

more comprehensive look at women's art production in the rural art colony context.

More broadly, this is also an image that depicts the presence of artists in St. Ives

(or at least, in tourist locations). Although Stanhope Forbes notes that in the artists'

colonies in Cornwall, "every corner was a picture,'.ss and Kenneth McConkey mentions

that "[0lften there is a sense of artists observing one another or being observed by

passers-by,,,86 we rarely see pictorial evidence of this. Painters concentrated their efforts

on the locals-and McNicoll was certainly not immune from this-erasing their fellow

artists and tourists from their canvases.87 Under the Shadow o/the Tent is thus an

interesting diversion from the norm in the way it asserts the presence of artists and

tourists on the seashore. So, white Laura Knight describes her time in Cornwall as

"student life in surroundings such as we'd never dreamed of; a carefree life of sunlit

pleasure and leisurely study,'.ss we must recognize that St. Ives was also a site for artistic

production and work. ***

The heyday of rural artists' colonies ended with WWI, coinciding closely with

Helen McNicoll's death in 1915. In England, the number of paintings of seaside beaches

and cHffs drastically declined: the English government imposed restrictions on coastline

painting for fears of national security, and life in the Cornish artists' colonies ground to a

85 Bireh, 28. 86 MeConkey, British lmpressionism, 49. 87 There do exist many photographie images of artists at work. We have already seen one photograph of MeNicoll in her studio (fig. 3); MeNieoll's own photographs of Dorothea Sharp at work, diseussed in ehapter 3, are other examples (figs. 22 and 23); see Jacobs for images of other artists. 88 Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (London: Igor Nicholson and Watson, 1936), 162. 40 haIt. Although St. Ives rebounded after the end of the war, Newlyn never recovered, and remains primarily a fishing village today.89

Art history also veered in another direction. Although artists' colonies such as St.

Ives were extremely popular, and well-recognized in the artistic journals of the period, the post-war emphasis on the avant-garde led to the almost total neglect of this international phenomenon, and the artists and paintings it produced. Although the fact has

since been forgotten, the rural artist colony was an utterly modern creation. Based in the

emergence of mass tourism at this time-a modern phenomenon-rural artists' colonies

and the artists who worked at them must be seen as an essential part of the modern

experience. Helen McNicoll' s seemingly nostalgie, old-fashioned paintings of the beach

and coastline document this experience, and should be recognized as modern in their own

way.

89 Caroline Fox, Dame Laura Knight (Oxford: Phaidon, 1988),40-44. 41

CHAPfER2

SIGHTSEEING: LANDSCAPE AND TOURISM IN THE WORK OF HELEN McNICOLL

Having looked at Helen McNicoll's experience at rural artists' colonies in

England and Europe, we may now examine the subjects she painted white there.

McNicoll is now known aimost exclusively for what Natalie Luckyj calls "Iuminous and intimate paintings [which] celebrate the separate world of women and chitdren.,,1

Although recent scholarship has begun to explore these images in terms of their potential for subversion and resistance to late-Victorian and Edwardian gender roles, it remains centred on issues of domesticity and femininity.2 White this research is certainly important, a significant portion of McNicoll's oeuvre has been left unexamined: her landscape and outdoor genre paintings. Through the practice of plein-air painting, the use of viewpoints that deny a powerful male gaze, and the inclusion of women and girls in

outdoor public spaces, Helen McNicoll's landscape work offers an even more explicit

challenge to the idea of "femininity" as it was conceived at the tum of the twentieth

century.

Landscape and outdoor genre subjects comprised a very large percentage of Helen

McNicoll's artistic output? Indeed, she was initially weil known as a painter of these

1 Natalie Luckyj, Helen McNicoll: A Canadian lmpressionist (Toronto: AGO, 1999), 15. 2 See, for example, Kristina HuneauIt, "Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoll," Art History 27, no. 2 (Apri12004): 212-249; Luckyj, 63; Lynne Lacombe Robinson, "Tranquil Transgressions: The Formation of a Feminine Social Identity in Helen McNicoll's Representations of Women," MA Thesis, University of Alberta, 2003. 3 The catalogue which accompanied her memorial exhibition at the AAM in 1925 Iists 141 paintings and oil sketches, and indicates that a great deal of her work was concerned with the outdoors and landscape. Because so many of McNicoll' s works remain in private collections, 1 am often inferring their subject matter based on titles alone: The Sunny Vista, Looking Seaward, and Watching the Boat ail suggest a 42 subjects; that she was primarily a painter of outdoor scenes was remarked on by most contemporaneous writers: one review of her memorial exhibition at the AAM in 1925 states, "Miss McNicoll' s works are for the most part landscapes or pictures of the open air" and even notes, "[t]he compositions of larger figures are interesting, but unequal and sometimes rather experimental, as if the painter had not found herself so surely in them as in the landscapes. ,>4 It was a landscape that won McNicoll the AAM' s first Jessie Dow

Prize, and the only two paintings sold to institutions during her lifetime were landscapes.

She was also included in Albert Robson's early survey of Canada's landscape tradition

(1932) as an artist who "produced excellent landscapes with figures."s These early texts are significant, not only for their acknowledgment of McNicoll's landscape work as

"excellent," but because they understand her images of women and children in outdoor

spaces as "landscapes" in the first place.

Natalie Luckyj's recent Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist (1999) also

includes many landscape paintings and outside genre subjects; however, the author's lack

of interest in this subject becomes clear in the essay that accompanies the images: Luckyj

focuses almost solely on what she refers to as McNicoll' s "absorption with the theme of

women and children.,!(j This is a representative view of the artist's work.7 For recent

scholars, the "theme of women and children" is incommensurate with the idea of

landscape. The erasure of Helen McNicoll' s interest in landscape from art historical

landscape or seascape. Others-Golden Grain, Haystacks, In the Hay, Ripening Fields-imply an agriculturallandscape as subject matter. Finally, there are many references to gardens, farms and farmyards, beaches, bridges, and fields. In stark contrast, very few titles imply traditionally feminine subjects such as women, children, and domestic situations (Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the late Helen G. McNicoll, RBA, ARCA [Montreal: AAM, 1925]). 4 "Pictures and Sketches by Helen G. McNicoll at the Art Association," Montreal Gazette, November Il, 1925.4. 5 Albert H. Robson, Canadian Landscape Painters (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1932), 162. 6 Luckyj, 20. 7 See Introduction. 43 scholarship is indicative of two important trends: first, there is the tendency to essentialize ail women's art (when it is examined at ail) as feminine, a category into which landscape, as it is usually defined, does not, and cannot, fall, and second, rural landscape scenes have been excluded from the modernist canon in favour of urban subjects. By considering images that have not traditionally been understood as

"landscape" by art historians (although, as we have seen, they were aclrnowledged as such during her Iifetime), 1 hope to begin to dismantle the art historical construction of landscape that has denied women the opportunity and authority to paint the outdoors. An examination of the diverse landscape paintings of Helen McNicoll thus provides an opportunity to problematize and expand the definition of landscape, contest the traditionally masculinist genre of landscape painting, and challenge the parameters of both modernity and modern art history. *** Several scholars have noted the tendency of nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century women artists to shy away from the landscape genre: Maria Tippett states simply that they "contribute[d] Iittle to landscape painting during the years before the Great

War,"S while Julia Gualtieri has proposed that women preferred figure painting to landscape. Gualtieri claims that her examination of exhibition statistics in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century reveal that figure studies outnumbered landscape subjects in

women's work by a wide margin. From this evidence, she concludes that landscape was

simply not a favoured subject of women painters.9 This is a deeply flawed argument:

8 Maria Tippett, By a Lady: Celebrating Three Centuries ofArt by Canadian Women (Toronto: Viking, 1992) 34. 9 Julia Gualtieri, "The Woman as Artist and Subject in Canadian Painting (1890-1930): Florence Carlyle, Laura Muntz Lyall, Helen McNicoll," MA Thesis, Queen's University, 1989.81-94. 44 what was exhibited does not necessarily correspond to what was painted-if anything, these numbers reflect the tastes of the male gallery directors and male-controlled exhibition committees, not those of the artists.

Many women did step outside and paint landscape and other outdoor scenes.

Deborah Cherry has noted that white women landscapists were rare in the early- nineteenth century, they were numerous in the last half of the century, and could be seen as the embodiment of new virtues: "Mobilising current metropolitan assumptions about the healthfulness of the countryside, these women redefined femininity as active, strong,

working, and self-determined."lo However, women who painted en-plein-air were still

primarily regarded as unconventional. Cherry notes that working in outdoor spaces put

women in an uncomfortable position: white painting the view, women artists often

became the view itself. English artist Louise Jopling (1843-1933) writes in 1872:

1 am, 1 believe, one of the sights of the village - with an easel in the garden of Bellevue, a large white umbrella (which a gallant captain holds over me), a youth and a mai den standing next to me as models. People come and stare at the gate, opera glasses are levelled at us in the distance, and strangers come beg for a peep, and altogether it is very amusing.ll

While plein-air painting was considered a more respectable practice by Helen McNicoll's

time, it remained a questionable activity that "required public visibility on an exposed site

at odds with ... codes of propriety."12 Furthermore, Luckyj notes that it would have been

especially difficult for the deaf McNicoll, who had to rely on companions such as her

\0 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 170. 11 Cherry, 170-71. Jopling's comment provides interesting insight into the complex relationship between class, gender, and race which marked artistic practice in rural spaces at this time. Jopling has a "gallant" man to hold an umbrella over her so that her complexion remains white and fair, a signifier of her middle­ class femininity. As we shall see in Chapter 3, skin colour was often seen as a marker of difference for rural workers. Here, though, it is Jopling who is marked as "other," and gawked at accordingly. 12 Cherry, 171. 45 cousin Dollie and her partner Dorothea Sharp to engage with models and curious onlookers. 13 *** Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins have found that "women and men are given different and unequal access to the imaginary and real spaces that make up landscape art.,,14 This imbalance is explicit in terms of artistic practice and embedded in art historical scholarship: the question of women's authority in painting the land was, and is, entangled in complex ideas about gender, nature, culture, and power. Landscape has become a subject of interest in several fields, and has been theorized in various ways within art history, including in stylistic terms, with regard to socio-historical context, and as "a conduit for the exercise of colonial power.,,15 A discussion of the history and historiography of landscape painting is far beyond the scope of this chapter.16 Significant to my analysis is a common assumption of recent landscape criticism: the argument that landscape is a complex social construction.17 It is crucial to examine how landscape is constructed, by whom, for what purposes, and, importantly, what is excluded. Although significant inroads have been made in exposing and challenging the power relations

13 Luckyj, 44. 14 Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins, Introduction to Gendering Landscape Art, ed. Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 2. IS Adams and Robins, 1. 16 For a helpful introduction to the Iiterature, see Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, Introduction to The lconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, eds. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels. (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988),4-8. 17 Cosgrove and Daniels, 1; Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990),2-3; W.J.T. Mitchell, Introduction to Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994),1-4. 46 involved in landscape art over the past quarter century, scholars have focused primarily on the issue of class;18 far less research has been done on the question of gender.

John Taylor has said that "the category of landscape is primarily not a phenomenon of the naturallie of the land ... but an attribute of sight. ,,19 As such, authors have recently turned to theories of the gaze to discuss the power relations inherent in the idea of "landscape.,,2o These ideas, usually discussed in relation to film theory or images of women, are relevant to an analysis of landscape art because of what Gillian Rose has called "the feminisation of nature.'>2l The association of "woman" with "nature" has a long history and a sinister connotation, articulated best by anthropologist Sherry B.

Ortner in her seminal essay "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?,,22 Ortner seeks to explain the transcultural and transhistorical subordination of women, persuasively arguing that their

second-class status could be accounted for, quite simply, by postulating that women are being identified or symbolically associated with nature, as opposed to men, who are identified with culture. Since it is always culture's project to subsume and transcend nature, if women were considered part of nature, then culture would find it 'natural' to subordinate, not to say oppress, them.23

18 See, for example: John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986); Green. 19 John Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography, and the Tourist's Imagination (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 12. 20 Adams and Robins, 3-4; Susan Ford, "Landscape Revisited: A Feminist Reappraisal," in New Words, New Worlds: Reconceptualising Social and Cultural Geography, ed. Chris Philo, 151-55 (Lampeter, O.K.: Social and Cultural Geography Study Group of the Institute of British Geographers, 1991); Catherine Nash, "Reclaiming Vision: Looking at Landscape and the Body," Gender, Place, and Culture 3, no. 2 (1996): 149-169; Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits ofGeographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 21 Rose, 88. 22 Sherry B. Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 67-87 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974). Ortner finds that women are universally identified as being closer to nature than men because of their procreative capacity, the social roles they inhabit as a result of their maternai bodies, and through the psychological attributes constructed in these social roi es (73-4). 23 Ortner, 73. 47

This relationship between nature, culture, and gender is iIlustrated in a

Renaissance woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) (fig. 5), in which a woman lies naked on a table, prepared to be visually dissected by a male artist. The association between woman and nature is made c1ear through the inclusion of a landscape in the window. There is no barrier between the woman and the outdoors, and the curves of her body are echoed in the rolling hills of the background, making it seem as though the woman is actually part of the landscape. In contrast, the male artist sits c1early distinguished from both woman and nature, separated definitively by the graphing device, the windowsill, and the potted plant. He represents "culture," whose "project it is to subsume and transcend nature." This role is apparent in the presence of the instruments: the artist is not making a quick sketch; he is attempting to map her body. Norma Broude

summarizes the relationship between artist and model: "[t]hus measured and framed by the rational devices of perspective construction, she, Nature, has become both literally

and metaphorically the passive female object of the controlling male gaze.,,24

Broude's statement re-introduces the question of the gaze to a discussion of

landscape and landscape art. We have established that nature, represented as the

landscape, is gendered female; the question now becomes "who can look pleasurably at

such a landscape?" In her influential essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,"

Laura Mulvey posits, "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has

been split between active/male and passive/female."25 While Mulvey is interested in film,

we may extend this theory to landscape viewing and art. John Taylor states succinctly:

24 Norma Broude, Impressionism: A Feminist Reading; The Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 147. 25 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 4 (1975): 11. 48

"[t]he disengaged look of the universal man was (and remains) the look of mastery;

gazing was (and is) a masculine attribute. Anyone ... taking in the view looks with a

masculine eye of survey, ownership, and control. ,,26

Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (c. 1749) (fig. 6), by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88), is a

painted example of this "masculine eye of survey, ownership, and control." A portrait of

a gentleman and his wife, Gainsborough has perched his subjects over an agricultural

landscape-their own property. The lush, cultivate

background, and the haystacks ail evoke the feminine ideas of passivity and fertility. The

composition is clear and coherent, aiming to expose the land to the viewer's gaze. The

viewer's position, elevated on a hilltop at a fixed distance, allows an uninterrupted view

of the land, extending ail the way back to the horizon. We are guided through the painting

in a specifie and deliberate way; the eye is drawn in through the curves of the Andrews'

heads, down through the arm of the ben ch, and back to the horizon via the row of worked

land. The trees (behind the couple, and on the right side) frame the vista. This kind of

organization has been widely discussed as the dominant feature of landscape art in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.27 Mary Louise Pratt claims that it works to give the

impression that what the artist "sees is ail there is, and ... [that] the landscape was

intended to be viewed from where he has emerged upon it.,,28 The male artist-and

presumed male viewer-controls and masters the landscape through his gaze.29

26 Taylor, 10. 27 John Berger, Ways ofSeeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972), 16- 18; Green, 133; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992),204-205; Rose, 90-91; Taylor, 34. 28 Pratt, 204-205. 291t should be noted that it is not only the tame, worked English landscape that is gendered female. Canada's landscape was not fertile and passive: it was thought to be wild, uninhabited, unknowable, and seemingly uncontrollable. The wildness of Canada's landscape became its defining feature over the course of the twentieth century. Helped in part by the writings of scholars such as Margaret Atwood and Northrop 49

*** Where does this leave the female viewer? For Mulvey, women in film are passive objects of the gaze; women viewers can either identify with this position or take on the masculine position of the active observer. She does not offer an alternative. The project of exploring the possibility of a female gaze is taken up by Gillian Rose, who recognizes that it is insufficient to invert the positions of active male viewer and passive female

object: the underlying power structure remains problematic.30 Rather, she proposes

several potential feminist gazes. It is in the interest of exploring these possibilities that 1

turn now to the work of Helen McNicoll. McNicoll's landscape paintings are diverse in

subject, style, and composition, and many represent different ways of viewing and

depicting landscape.

Rose's first proposition is unconvincing; pointing to ideas put forth by feminist

theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Nancy Chodorow, as weil as case studies by

anthropologists and geographers, she suggests that women may simply see landscape and

Frye, and by the paintings of the Group of Seven, the sheer volume and wildness of the Canadian landscape helped to define itself in contrast to England and Europe. This wildness is, of course, gendered female, whether by Lawren Harris who describes it as the "clear replenishing Virgin north" (Brian S. Osborne, "The Iconography of Nationhood in Canadian Art," in The Iconography ofLandscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation. Design, and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, 162-78 [Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 172), or by Northrop Frye, who Eva Mackey quotes as stating, "To enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent" (Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and Nationalldentity in Canada [Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2002], 47). For Mackey, this "constructs Canada as a devouring, dangerous and alien female, even a vagina dentata (toothed vagina)" (47). Gillian Rose points out the paradox in personifying Nature as woman: you don't only get the nurturing Mother Barth, but "terrifying maternai swamps, mountains, seas inhabited by sphinxes and gorgons" (106). Regardless of the type of landscape, it is consistently the masculine gaze which can control it. In England, theories of the picturesque, sublime, and beautiful dictated the ways of seeing landscape. Taylor statés, "Taking aesthetic pleasure from landscape is not widely recognized to involve work at ail, though actually it depends on •good taste' gained through education in the ways of certain social classes" (17). This education was, of course, only available to men: Taylor calls this "the detached position of the masculine' educated eye'" (9-10). The control and mastery of the wild Canadian landscape is spoken of in even more gendered terms: the man who conquers Canadian nature is tough, virile, strong, and surviving (Mackey, 41). 30 Rose, 110. 50 nature differently than men. Whether because of their biological make-up or social conditioning, she argues, women interact with the landscape in a more intirriate, nurturing manner?! To explore this point, Rose looks to geographer Jeanne Kay. Discussing bourgeois women in the nineteenth century, Kay posits that "the social relations which developed from their concem with their gardens and domestic labour gave them a specifie position from which to see the land.,,32

We may tum to McNicoll's Gathering Flowers (c. 1912) (fig. 7) as an example of this idea. This is not a traditionallandscape. Depicting a young girl picking flowers, rather than a pastoral scene or sublime view, the image simply concentrates on a girl engaged in an everyday task. In style, as weil as subject matter, this is a small scale, intimate depiction of the way women may relate to nature and landscape. The canvas is divided into two distinct spaces: the bordered path and the hilly landscape in the background. The intricate detail of the plants surrounding the girl contrasts with the way that the landscape in the distance is treated with broad strokes, and draws our attention to the activity in the foreground. This girl is relating to the land through her flower picking, and the viewer may relate to the land through her.

However, the belief that women see nature and landscape differently than men is

unsatisfactory. Although Rose denies an essentialist reading offemininity, citing studies

which have examined various groups of women, this interpretation does not sufficiently

account for social and historical circumstances which may determine ways of seeing even

more powerfully than gender. Looking again at Gathering Flowers, we see that it is not

only through gender that one relates to the land: class is obviously a factor as weil. The

31 Rose, 111-12. 32 Rose, 112. 51 girl's posture (she is kneeling down, bent over), the plants surrounding her (which have been plucked of ail their blossoms), and the presence of a basket indicate that this is more than just a casual stop to pick flowers on a leisurely walk:33 this girl is working-possibly she is picking the flowers to sell at a village or town market. Gender is not the only lens through which she-or anyone-sees the land.

Rose' s next challenge to the traditionallandscape is a viewing position that attempts to "dissolve ... the illusion of an unmarked, unitary, distanced, masculine spectator.,,34 Here she looks to the work offeminist art historian Griselda Pollock and geographer Susan Ford, who have located such gazes in the space of paintings of nineteenth-century women artists, and in nineteenth-century English gardens, respectively.

In the seminal essay "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," Griselda Pollock discusses, among other things, the work of Impressionists Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) and

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). She finds that these women explored new kinds of pictorial space in their paintings, and in doing so, "disturbed the 'Iogic of the gaze ....35 Pollock examines various spatial techniques used by the artists-more than one spatial system in a single painting, a "compression" of the foreground space, a denial of traditional perspective, and the idea of experiential space36-all of which disrupt a "mastering eye/I.,m

33 Compare, for example, ta McNicoll's Picking Flowers (c. 1912) (fig. 8). Although placed on a similar path, these children give the air of having just stopped on their way somewhere else: they are standing, there is no basket, and the f10wers around them remain on their stems. The presence of steps at the end of the path indicate that they are near a home, Iikely in a cultivated garden. 34 Rose, 112. 35 Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories ofArt, 50-90 (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 63. 36 Pollock, 62-66. Pollock defines experiential space thusly: "Instead of pictorial space functioning as a notional box into which objects are placed in a rational and abstract relationship, space is represented 52

These potentially feminist treatments of pictorial space are also evident in

McNicoll's landscape painting. Reaping Time (c. 1909) (fig. 9), for example, has a fairly traditional subject matter. Depicting a field glowing in the sun, the stacks of hay in the foreground remind the viewer that this is worked land. In view of recent landscape criticism, then, Reaping Time would appear to represent the same problematic class issues as a traditional landscape painting. However, the viewpoint is not that of an elevated, distanced onlooker, able to master the landscape through his gaze. Rather, the

view depicted is from the bottom of a hilllooking up. While we, as the viewer, are elevated above part of the landscape (seen in the right middle-ground), we are also denied

access to that land: the hill blocks our view. McNicoll's The Little Worker (c. 1907) (fig.

20) employs a similar perspective, situating the viewer at the bottom of a hill, looking up

to a girl carrying a pail, and beyond her, to farm buildings at the top of the painting. As

will be examined in Chapter 3, the perspective used in this case actually emphasizes the

girl' s hard work, reminding us of the distance she has traveled, and the uphill trek she has

to get back home after her chores. Both paintings use an unconventional viewpoint to

effectively counter a mastering gaze.

Susan Ford's work on gardens is also relevant to a discussion of McNicoll's

paintings. Ford states that the feminine gaze might "reveal aspects of the landscape which

other ways of looking have chosen to ignore, for example the detail of the scene or its

place in everyday life.,,38 For Ford, the garden provides a new way of looking (and,

according to the way it is experienced by a combination of touch, texture, as weil as sight. Thus objects are patterned according to subjective hierarchies of value for the producer" (65). 37 Pollock, 64. 38 Ford, 153. 53 indeed, an expansion of the definition of landscape) through its emphasis on detail, design, and size.39

We may look at paintings such as Tea Time (c. 1911) (fig. 10) and A Retreat (c.

1911) (fig. 11) as illustrations ofthese ideas. Both paintings are small in scale, and depict

backyard gardens. They invite the viewer to focus on details such as the individualleaves

and petaIs of the fIowers and plants, and the tiles of the rooftop and trelliswork of the

fence in the background of Tea Time. Ultimately, they deny a mastering gaze, since the

viewer is restricted from the intimate space of the garden by the tall plants in the

foreground of both images that block our view. The viewer is thus encouraged to scan

over the entire surface of the painting in search of a way to enter the space. These images

do control our viewing experience, but in the interest of exploration and intimacy, rather

than exposure, order, and mastery.

However, these arguments, while compelling, are also somewhat lacking. It is

certainly true that the art of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, and the experience and

depiction of gardens involve different viewpoints which provide a challenge to the

traditional male gaze; however, the "diss[olution of] the illusion of an unmarked, unitary,

distanced, masculine spectator" may also be seen, according to Nina Lübbren, not as a

uniquely feminist goal, but as a trend in late-nineteenth-century art in general.40

Lübbren examines a style of landscape painting prevalent in rural artists' colonies

at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries that contradicts

traditionallandscape composition. She contends that artists painting nature in this context

were uninterested in controlling the land by gazing over it; rather, they wished to

39 Ford, 154. 40 Pollock acknowledges that "[p]Iaying with spatial structures was one of the defining features of early modernist painting in Paris" (62). 54 immerse themselves in it, in "an attempt to capture the multi-sensual (not just visual) character of the experience of nature.'>41 These artists-and we may include Helen

McNicoll among them - "emphatically rejected the distanced masterful gaze, associated with views, panoramas, and landscape painting.'>42

Lübbren goes on to examine sorne of the methods employed by painters to give the impression of immersion, in particular, a device that she caUs an "immersive foreground." By this, she means the various elements painters used to bring the scene right up to the edge of the canvas, including, for instance, water on the beach, paths, and detaHed c1ose-ups of trees, flowers, and fields, ail placed at the very bottom of the image to make it seem as though the space continues outside of the frame.43 These devices, she says, "do not imply a viewer standing above the landscape, gazing down on it, but one standing, sitting, or Iying in the landscape.'>44

McNicoll frequently uses an immersive foreground. Upon retuming to the landscapes discussed earlier, we see that many of the tactics outlined by Lübbren are in effect. In each, perspective and composition are used to make it seem as though the viewer occupies the same space as the painting: we are in the field with the haystacks in

Reaping Time, and on the same hill as the girl in The Little Warker. Tea Time and A

Retreat show the attention to detail and close up examination of plants discussed by

Lübbren, making it seem as though the viewer is in the garden, brushing his or her way through the foliage. Gathering Flawers, through the use of the path and border of flowers

41 Nina Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 1870-1910 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001),81. 42 Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 92. 43 Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 98. 44 Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 100. 55 and bushes, brings the landscape right up to the viewer. On the whole, an "immersive foreground" is used in nearly aIl of McNicoIl' s outdoor work.

Lübbren locates the motivation behind this style as an "attempt to transcribe a way of experiencing the natural environment which fuses subject and object, individual and habitat. ,145 As such, artists focused not simply on what they saw, but on the whole experience of nature. Indeed, Natalie Luckyj notes McNicoll's "absolute engagement with the sensory physical world of her subjects.,,46 Her landscapes do work toward this goal: Luckyj recognizes that in The Little Worker, "the brilliant yellow hues and short rapid brushstrokes convey sensations of heat and wind.,,47 Tea Time is celebrated for its invocation of ''fragrant scent.'148 In ail of her images, the thick, loose application of paint gives a sense of materiality or tangibility to the subjects. Works like these attempt to entice ail of the senses, immersing the viewer in the experience.

It is, however, important to note that McNicoll's deafness would have prevented her from achieving the kind of total immersion that Lübbren discusses. This fact is noted by several critics: Paul Duval and Natalie Luckyj both remark on the way that McNicoll conveys aIl of the sights and sounds of the beach-the wind, the light, the waves, the children - without actually being able to hear the waves and laughs of the children she was painting.49 Kristina Huneault discusses at length the significance of silence in

McNicoll' s work, Iinking it to the artist' s deafness, and finding in her images a resulting emphasis on movement, bOth in subject ("skirts blowing in the seaside breeze") and in

45 Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 109. 46 Luckyj, 50. 47 Luckyj, 48. 48 Luckyj, 63. 49 Paul Duval, Canadian lmpressionism (Toronto and London: McClelland and Stewart, 1990), 94; Luckyj, 70. 56 style ("the dynamism of fully articulated brushstrokes"~. Huneault concludes, "As the focus of sense-perception in McNicoll' s work, sound and its absence are far outweighed by vision and touCh.,,51 With this statement, we retum to the importance of vision and the gaze. *** The work of Catherine Nash is also relevant to a discussion of McNicoll' s landscape paintings. Nash proposes a way of looking which is effectively neither masculine nor feminine:

1 want to consider here the possibilities for multiple and immobile identifications with ways of seeing landscapes, and to unfix both versions of gender and sexual identity from ideas of masculine activity and the 'male gaze' and feminine passivity and reception of this gaze ... In recognizing the constructed and therefore unstable basis of both ideas of identity and landscape, feminists could employ non-essential ideas of landscape, place, and nature without being tied to the choice between masculine distance from and feminine closeness to nature. A voiding this dualism may be more disruptive and enabling than deciding between them.52

For Nash then, women's landscape art, even when it remains traditional in viewpoint or

subject matter,53 does not necessarily require adopting a masculine power position; in fact, it can be seen as subverting the "power and naturalness,,54 of even calling such a

position masculine. This is an interesting, and ultimately satisfying, way of reconciling

the dilemma of a feminine gaze.

50 Huneault, 228. 51 Huneault, 228. 52 Nash, 156-57. 53 Although 1 have been primarily concerned with McNicoll's unconventionallandscapes, 1 do not mean to imply that she did not paint any traditional views. Stubble Fields (c. 1912), for example, depicts a hayfield populated by haystacks and peasants, with a vast hilly landscape extending ail the way to the horizon. The viewpoint is elevated, and a1lows the viewer the illusion of seeing ail that there is to see. The workers here are small and undefined: they are part of the scenery. 54 Nash, 157. 57

Nash champions the importance of historical specificity, stating, "the simple suggestion that landscape representation is ideological, or vision oppressive, suggests an ahistorical condemnation of the genre, practice, or media rather than attention to the particular effects of images in specific and finely differentiated social contexts. ,,55 In the case of Helen McNicoIl, the "specific and finely differentiated context" is within the world of mass tourism and leisure activity in Britain and Europe in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. McNicoll's painted images of landscape both reflect these new practices, at the same time as they help to construct them. A comprehensive analysis of McNicoll' s landscape must take this context into account. *** In style, as weIl as subject matter, Helen McNicoll 's landscapes fit comfortably into a major, but relatively unresearched, artistic phenomenon Iinked to turn of the twentieth century tourist activity. In her essay "North to South: Paradigm Shifts in

European Art and Tourism, 1880-1920," Nina Lübbren discusses the "widespread partiality among European and American artists from the late-1870s to the mid-1890s for overcast days and the subsequent and almost complete shift to a preference for sunny skies around the turn-of-the-century."56 This trend, she argues, was both international in scope, affecting artists from aIl over Europe and North America, and unrelated to any particular school or style. In fact, she proposes, it is precisely because this trend was so far-reaching that it has been ignored by modernist art history:

Despite attempts since the early 1980s to dislodge the modernist artistic canon and to open out the field to critical issues beyond traditional formai analysis, the

55 Nash, 151. 56 Nina Lübbren, "North to South: Paradigm Shifts in European Art and Tourism, 1880-1920," in Visual Culture and Tourism, ed. David Crouch and Nina Lübbren, 125-46 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 125. 58

history of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art remains partitioned into disconnected areas, with the French Isms (Impressionism, Symbolism, Post­ Impressionism, ... Fauvism) occupying centre stage and other national "schools" neatly slotted into their separate trajectories.57

An examination of this trend, then, in addition to providing an extremely apt lens through which to interpret Helen McNicoll's landscape work, also challenges the canons of art history.

Lübbren details an artistic practice th.at shifted in focus-sometimes even within the work of an individual artist-from grey light and muted colours (which "signified the pre-modern in the guise of 'timeless' nature and locals in regional costume"S8) to sunshine and bright light. She relates this shift to a change in painters' attitudes towards tourism: the grey mode may be seen as participating in what James Buzard has called

"anti-tourism," an attitude which many travellers-and especially artists-took on, which looked down on tourism in favour of "authentic" travel experience;59 white the sunny mode can be linked to newer forms of tourism such as walking on boardwalks, going on nature hikes, and spending the day at the beach.60

Helen McNicoll can certainly be seen as participating in this paradigm shift. Her earliest works are dark in tone, likely influenced by the painters of the Hague School,61 who, as Lübbren puts it, "based their entire reputation on their ability to reveal the

57 Ltibbren, "North to South," 128. 58 Ltibbren, "North to South," 131. 59 James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1-4. 60 Ltibbren wishes to impress upon the reader that both practices were equally modern in their own ways, one working through nostalgia; the other, through a celebration of new kinds of tourist practice (Ltibbren, "North to South," 139-40). 61 Luckyj, 36. Village Street (1904) is one example: Luckyj states that "the use of subdued earth tones with small touches of luminosity in the sky and the lower right corner show her familiarity with the palette and mood of the celebrated Hague School painters (36). 59

'poetry of grey.' ,>62 This group of Dutch painters exerted a great deal of infl uence in

Canada at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly in Montreal, where the

AAM included their work in exhibitions, and where wealthy Scottish-Canadians formed private collections of images that reminded them of their homeland.63 McNicoll, educated and exhibiting at the AAM, could hardly have ignored their popularity; moreover, her family contacts-particularly her father, a Scot, and Director of CP Rail-would have had close relationships with many of the most significant collectors of the period, including Sir William Van Horne, Sir George Drummond, and Lord Strathcona.64 There is evidence that their influence was even more direct: Paul Duval notes that the McNicoll family owned paintings by Hague School artist Jan Weissenbruch (1824-1903),65 and

McNicoll herself owned a copy of the catalogue for the memorial exhibition of Jozef

Israëls (1824-1911).66

However, McNicoll's later landscapes are ideal representatives of the sunny mode

discussed by Lübbren. Paintings such as Sunny Days (1910), Sunny September (1913), A

Sunny Morning, The White Sunshade, Sunshine, In the Sun, and Street in Sunlight are just

a few of the images whose titles suggest her preoccupation with the subject. Likely

encouraged to paint sunlight by Julius Olsson and Algernon Talmage in St. Ives,67

62 Lübbren, "North to South," 129. 63 Marta H. Hurdalek, The Hague School: Collecting in Canada at the Turn of the Century (Toronto: AGO, 1984), 13-15. 64 Luckyj notes that McNicoll' s father sketched with Van Horne (19), and that the latter bought the artist' s A September Morning in 1909 (20). 6S Duval, 94. 66 Luckyj, 77. 67 We may refer here to the first hand account of Emily Carro Carr, who even at this early date, was interested in painting the dark woods she would become famous for, talks about how Olsson disregarded her protest that "the glare of the sea and white sand blind me with headache" (Emily Carr, Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr [Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, and Company, 1946], 167), and commanded her to '''Go out there' (he pointed to the glaring sands) 'out to the bright sunlight-PAINT!'" (174). 60

McNicoll came to her "sunny" style within the context of tourism and the rural artists' colony discussed in Chapter 1. The sites she frequented (Brittany, Grèz-sur-Loing,

Cornwall, Yorkshire) were among those which Lübbren describes as going through a

process of "southernization."68 Cornwall in particular seems to have experienced a major

shift: over a short period, artistic depictions of the area evolved from the muted tones and

sombre subject matter of a painter like Stanhope Forbes to cheery representations of the

newly-christened "Cornish Riviera."69 McNicoll's paintings of beaches, cliff tops, and

sun-drenched fields must be read as participating in this shift towards a celebration of

modern leisure in the form of tourism.

McNicoll has been consistently celebrated for these sun-filled canvases, both in

her own time and in recent scholarship. William R. Watson included McNicoll in his

review of the 1911 Spring Exhibition of the AAM under the category of "Painters of

Sunshine;" discussing The Apple Gatherer (fig. 19), he marvels at "the quality of open-

air sunshine, disarming ail thoughts of labour in the studio.,,70 Rer obituary in the

Montreal Gazette discusses her "skill in depicting sunlight and shadow," concluding that

"[s]trong sunlight especially appealed to her.,,71 Critics since then have also commented

on her depiction of "brilliant sunlight,"72 her "happy colour harmonies,'>73 and "her

concern with rendering the effects of bright sunlight.,,74

68 Lübbren, "North to South," 136. 69 Lübbren, "North to South," 138. 70 William R. Watson, "Artists' Work of High Order," Montreal Gazette, March 10, 1911. 7. 71 "Death Cuts Short Promising Career," Montreal Gazette, June 28,1915.5. n Luckyj, 46, 53. 73 Duval, 92. 74 Carol Lowrey, '" Into Line with the Progress of Art:' The Impressionist Tradition in Canadian Painting, 1885-1920," in Visions of Light and Air: Canadian /mpressionism. /885-1920, ed. Carol Lowrey, 15-39 (New York: Americas Society Art Gallery. 1995), 35. 61

McNicoll' s many images of beach landscapes demonstrate both the sunny style and the subject matter discussed by Lübbren. Paintings such as Sunny Days (c. 1910) (fig.

12) and On the Beach (c. 1912) (fig. 13) are characteristic of this body of work.

McNicoll's beaches, possibly influenced by Spanish Impressionist Joaquin Sorolla (1863-

1923),75 are filled with bright sunlight. Pure whites, yellows, and blues are used in each of

the above paintings to evoke the feeling of a clear, warm summer day. In subject, too,

McNicoll's beachscapes are emblematic of Lübbren's shift. Going to the beach is

precisely the kind of new tourist activity that concerns her. McNicoll' s inclusion of

middle- and upper-class women in her scenes is in contrast to the earlier tendency to use

locals as models.76 Moreover, as in McNicoll's other landscapes, the viewer is totally

immersed in the scene. The space between the viewer and the subjects in the paintings is

collapsed: in each, the sand cornes right up to the edge of the canvas. This is particularly

true in Sunny Days, where we find that the woman at the bottom of the image has actually

been cut off by the frame. The perspective that is used creates the impression that the

viewer is also on the beach, situated behind the people in the painting, looking out at the

same view as they are. The viewer is totally implicated in the scene: we have become

tourists.

It is within this context of modern tourism that Helen McNicoll painted her most

interesting landscape images. Considered with regard to what John Urry has called "the

tourist gaze," works such as On the Cliffs (c. 1913) (fig. 14) and Sunny September (1913)

(fig. 15) celebrate these new tourist institutions, as weIl as challenge the dominance of the

male gaze as it applies to landscape: these images are explicitly about women looking.

75 McNicoll would most likely have seen Sorolla's "sparkling beach scenes" at a major exhibition of his work in London in 1907 (Lowrey, 35). 76 Lübbren, "North to South," 138. 62

For Urry, tourism is linked to the gaze on a very basic level. Discussing the phenomenon, he states,

At least part of that experience is to gaze upon or view a set of different scenes, of landscapes or townscapes which are out of the ordinary. When we "go away" we look at the environment with interest and curiosity. It speaks to us in ways we appreciate, or at least we anticipate that it will do so. In other words, we gaze at what we encounter.77

However, this "tourist gaze" has historically been determined by its opposite, by what it does not look at, and what it refuses to take in: the everyday sights of the tourist back at home, the mundane sites of the tourist location (hotel rooms, parking lots), or the home and work spaces of the host culture, for example.78 In a traditionallandscape painting- and a traditional tourist view - it is the human presence that is most often conspicuously absent. Pertinent to this discussion is Urry's examination of the "romantic gaze," a term he uses to describe looking out over the "undisturbed natural beauty"79 of the landscape.

Here, "the emphasis is upon solitude, privacy, and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze."so This is the view that most landscape paintings attempt to evoke. For instance, Robert L. Herbert finds this romantic gaze in the work of Claude

Monet.sl In paintings such as Cliffs at Varengville (1882) (fig. 16), Monet depicts a view of the sea, from the heights of grassy green cliffs. This is a typical tourist scene,

portrayed without any signs of the tourist industry, including sightseers. Although there almost certainly would have been others around white Monet was painting, this site likely

nd 77 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2 edition (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage Publications. 2002). 1. 18 Urry, 1-2. 79 Urry, 43. Urry also discusses an alternative to the 'romantic' gaze which he caUs the 'collective' gaze. This type of gaze actually depends on the presence of other people, to make the site seem as though "this is the place to be and that one should not be elsewhere" (43). This is the tourist gaze as employed at a resort or in a large city (43~44). 80 Urry, 43. 81 Robert L. Herbert, Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867-1886. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994),4. 63 being a lookout point on what James Buzard might cali "the beaten track," the artist has erased their presence. Herbert points out that, in fact, Monet has selectively edited his paintings of tourist locations for ail signs of modemity: the villages, hotels, restaurants, and other institutions created to serve tourist needs are never apparent in his work.

Herbert states that this kind of solitary, pre-modem vision of nature was what visitors hoped to see,82 and furthermore, what Monet' s paintings, being sold back to the same audience, helped to construct.83

Helen McNicoll's On the Cliffs (c. 1913) (fig. 14) challenges this idea of a solitary, mastering, romantic gaze. Depicting two female figures standing on a cliff and looking across the calm waters of a bay, the image is quite simply about women looking at scenery. Their c1ean white dresses suggest that these are not local working girls, but middle-c1ass tourists enjoying the view. McNicoll's subject finds a peer in the work of

Laura Knight.84 Knight's Two Girls on a Cliff(c. 1917) (fig. 17), which also depicts two young women looking contemplatively out over the sea, provides an apt comparison.

Nina Lübbren daims that "the women shown lounging idly on the cliff tops are stand-ins for ... urban viewers. Their gaze from an elevated lookout point onto a sea panorama replicates a tourist' s gaze onto the proverbial view.'oSs While this is parti y true, it does not push the discussion far enough. Indeed, an image such as McNicoll' s explicitly denies a solitary, romantic view of nature: the viewer only sees the landscape through the girls, and is forced to acknowledge the presence of other people in his or her sightseeing.

82 Herbert, 1-2. 83 Herbert, 6-7. 84 Knight was in Cornwall between 1907-1918. (Caroline Fox, Dame lAura Knight [Oxford: Phaidon, 1988],25). She is recorded as having been a good friend of McNicoll's partner Dorothea Sharp, so 1 believe that it is not unlikely that the two women knew each other, orat least, knew of each other's work (Tom Cross, The Shining Sands: Artists in Newlyn and St. Ives, 1880-1930 [Tiverton, Devon: Westcountry Books, 1994], 171). 8S LUbbren, "North to South," 138. 64

Both McNicoli and Knight return to the subject of women looking at landscape time and time again.86 McNicoll's Sunny September (1913) (fig. 15), which was exhibited at the RBA upon her election,87 is a final example. A now familiar image of middle-class

women, likely tourists, looking out over the water, Sunny September brings together the

various threads of this chapter. Like On the Cliffs, the image denies the viewer a romantic

gaze of the landscape: we are once again confronted with other onlookers. Moreover, in

this case, we can hardly see the vista the subjects are looking at. There is a small section

of beach and water on the right si de of the painting, and it is obvious that this is the object

of the girls' gazes, but we, as viewers, are blocked access to the scene by the bushes and

tress which take up so much of the pictorial space. This is, then, not only a celebration of

modern tourism (and, by extension, modernity), but also an utter repudiation of

traditionallandscape painting and the male gaze. In this image, only the women are

allowed to look.

Finally, these paintings provide a firm rejection of the idea that "[p]ainting out of

doors was a suspect activity for female artists in the nineteenth century.'.s8 The women in

McNicoll's and Knight's images are on elevated lookout points, open to the potential

threat of being seen by any passer-by.89 White they theoretically work toward debunking

the idea that gazing upon "female" nature is an exclusively masculine privitege, they are

striving towards this goal in practice as well. Complex ideas about gender, nature,

culture, and power have dictated how "landscape" has been constructed. By examining

86 McNicoll' s beach scenes often fall into this category, as do her images Children on the Rocks (c. 1910) and The White Umbrella (date unknown); Knight's images of this subject include On the Cliffs (c. 1917), Lamorna Cove (c. 1917), and Cornwall (1912). 87 "Memorial Show of Work by Canadian," Montreal Gazette, November 10, 1925.5. 88 Adams and Robins, 8. 89 Knight takes this potential even further: the rocky cliffs that jut out over the sea that her women sit on suggest an element of danger, or at least a sense of daring on the part of the women. 65 images that have not been recognized by art historians as landscapes (and yet which were understood as such a century ago), we work to deconstruct a practice and a system of interpretation that has denied women the opportunity to produce Iandscape art and become known as Iandscape artists. 66

CHAPTER3

'A SPECTACLE OF DIFFERENCE:' REPRESENTING THE RURAL WORKING WOMAN

The Passing Train (fig. 18), by Marianne Preindlsberger-Stokes illustrates the complex relationship between the artists who participated in the rural artist colony lifestyle, the Iandscape that surrounded villages such as St. Ives, Pont-Aven, and Grèz- sur-Loing, and the inhabitants of this landscape. The Passing Train, painted c. 1890 when

Preindlsberger-Stokes was resident in St. Ives-fifteen years before Helen McNicoll would first visit the colony-depicts a peasant woman holding a bundle of hay watching a train speed by. We do not see the train itself, only the smoke that lingers behind it, obscuring part of the landscape. Kenneth McConkey has noted the juxtaposition of the rhythms of the harvest and the rhythm of the train.' This standard formalist interpretation neglects the serious social issues represented by the image: the fact that the train eclipses the landscape-the site of the woman's labour, and her means of survival-makes a significant statement about modernity, aIluding to the encroachment of the city's inhabitants, pollution, and disease upon the countryside. However, Preindlsberger-

Stokes's image is the exception to the rule: the majority of artists who painted the countryside and its inhabitants selectively edited their sights, erasing signs of modernity in the countryside, including tourism, modern agriculturaI machinery, and the railway,2 often in favour of the inclusion of the romanticized figure of the peasant.

1 Kenneth McConkey, Impressionism in Britain (London: Yale University Press and Barbican Art Gallery, 1995),198. 2 This trend was examined more fully in both Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of this thesis. 67

Peasants-defined here very broadly as any lower-class inhabitant of a rural area

3 whose livelihood is somehow tied to the land - were an extremely popular subject for painters across Europe and North America at the end of the nineteenth century, although this is not mirrored in an art historical tradition of scholarship that denies rural subjects the label of "modem." In the last quarter-century, the peasant image, most often found in landscape and outdoor genre painting, has begun to be recovered by art historians interested in social and economic history and class relations, particularly in Britain. A significant line of questioning in this research is concemed with how depictions of rural labourers worked to construct and support the value system of the bourgeoisie.4

Particularly pertinent to my research are the works of Lynda Nead and Karen Sayer, whose respective examinations of Victorian era images and parliamentary reports propose that representations of rural women served to propagate middle-class ideals of

Victorian femininity such as domesticity, matemity, piety, and purity, whether through positive examples of happy homes and families, or negative wamings of work and promiscuity.5 The majority of nineteenth-century English images of rural women fall into these categories, depicting peasant girls as either seductive flirts or as domestic angels.

3 This definition wou Id include both the agricuIturallabourer, and the domestic wife by his side; but exclude other working-c1ass types, such as mine and factory workers, or members of the newly formed service industry in tourist villages, for instance. 4 See, among others, Richard and Caroline Brettell, Painters and Peasants in the Nineteenth Century (Geneva: Rizzoli, 1983); Christiana Payne, Toil and Plenty: Images of the AgriculturallAndscape in England, 1780-1890 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993); Christopher Wood, Paradise Lost: Paintinss oJEnslish Country LiJe and Landscape, 1850-1914 (London: Barne and Jenkins, 1988). 5 Lynda Nead, Myths ofSexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Karen Sayer, Women of the Fields: Representations of Rural Women in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). This process of middle c1ass construction in opposition to the working-c1ass 'other' has also been examined by scholars with an interest in urban working women. See, for example, Leonore Davidoff, "Class and Gender in Victorian England," in Sex and Class in Women's History, ed. Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan, and Judith R. Walkowitz, 17-71 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); Kristina Huneault, Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880-1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 68

This chapter will examine how Helen McNicoll, so often celebrated for her feminine imagery, subverts this construction of femininity through representations of the working female body which run counter to traditional ways of depicting rural women. In images such as The Apple Gatherer (c. 1911) (fig. 19), The Little Worker (c. 1907) (fig.

20), and The Gleaner (c. 1908) (fig. 21), McNicoll presents rural women and girls engaged in their daily labours, free from the idealizing and/or objectifying gaze of the bourgeoisie seen in so many other images. She depicts neither the ideal mother or family

(in fact, as Kristina Huneault has pointed out, there are very few representations of

6 maternity in her oeuvre ), nor the highly sexualized peasant girl. Moreover, 1 intend to show that these paintings, often dismissed as old-fashioned depictions of an "Arcadian idyll,"7 are in fact, fundamentally modern. Glimpsed through the lens of tourism, which sought to explore, document, and reveal the "authentic" characteristics of unfamiliar groups and places, images of rural working women may be seen as modern in ways which have not been previously recognized as such. *** Chapter 1 of this thesis explored sorne of the ways artists interacted with the local inhabitants of the towns where rural artist colonies were established. However, it seems that artists' most common opinion of the locals was that they were simply part of the scenery. Indeed, contemporaries seemed to believe that the townspeople were put there specifically for painting. W. Christian Symons writes of Newlyn, "Here is an abundance of 'motive,' [the artist] selects and paints with it ail before him. He may plant his easel in the middle of the street if he chooses, there is no difficulty about models, the people are

6 Kristina Huneault, "Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoll," Art History 27, no. 2 (April 2004): 237. 7 Natalie Luckyj, Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist (Toronto: AGO, 1999), 13. 69 qui te accustomed to 'these sketching artists,' and are generally very willing to sit."s

Stanhope Forbes did not confine the artist to the village street: "[p]ainters have an easy way of walking into other people's houses, calmly causing their occupants no Iittle inconvenience.,,9 Alice Meynell, too, remarks that both St. Ives and Newlyn, "being fishing villages, have an always paintable population,,,IO making the Iink between the class and occupation of the "models" and their agency (or lack thereof) in choosing whether or not to be painted. Scholars Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock note that these represent standard beliefs: "[w ]ithin the discourses and practices of tourism not only the natural and man-made landscapes are of interest to the traveller. The indigenous population also provides a spectacle for the visitor to consume according to his or her point of view."ll Deborah Cherry agrees, and pushes the idea even further, stating that it was actually the practices of painting and tourism that actively "transformed the rural working classes into picturesque spectacles.,,12

There is very little evidence concerning how Helen McNicoll herself may have

related to the locals she chose to paint. Natalie Luckyj suggests that she may have had a

difficult time negotiating with models because of her hearing disability. Although no

indication of her deafness is made, the one mention of models in McNicoll's archivai

letters concerns having difficulty in finding willing participants in Walberswick. She

writes,

8 W. Christian Symons, "Newlyn and the Newlyn School," Magazine of Art, 1890,205. 9 Nina Lübbren, Rural Artists' Colonies, 1870-1910 (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 2001),44. 10 Alice Meynell, "Newlyn," Art Journal 9 (1889): 98. 11 Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, "Les Données Bretonnantes: La Prairie de Répresentation," Art History 3. no. 3 (September 1980): 326. 12 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 166. 70

We have had a bust for models, in fact we went to the next village 21/2 miles away to try and get one, so far without success. But one woman is sending her daughter around either tomorrow or this evening. A Mr. Jackson, a friend of Mr. Brymner, says that sorne artists get their models aIl the way from London. I3

Luckyj proposes that "McNicoll could rely on [her partner Dorothea] Sharp's ability to establish an open relationship with her child models, 'mostly the daughters of fishermen

[who loved] to dress up in the pretty frocks from the children's wardrobe she always carries with her. ",14

Two photographs taken by McNicoll (c. 1908) offer further insight into the relationship that she may have had with her models (and, by extension, the locals). The images depict her partner Dorothea Sharp with a young girl on a country lane. In the first image (fig. 22), the young girl stares out at the camera, one foot forward, a large basket placed at her waist, which causes her to tilt slightly to one side, her arm crossed across her torso to support the weight (or, perhaps, the appearance of weight). Sharp is 'fixing' the girl's hair, although it appears to remain picturesquely disheveled. In the second image (fig. 23), the frame has expanded to include two easels, and Sharp has returned to

her working position at the one on the left (the other is presumably McNicoll's own

canvas). The girl remains at a distance from the easels and the camera lens, still in the

same awkward position, her foot stuck in the same step forward. Made to stand like an

inanimate object, she has become the object of the gaze on multiple levels: for the two

artists, for McNicoll holding the camera, and finally, for the viewer looking at the

photograph. She is a spectacle. ***

13 Helen McNicoll to David McNicoll, 20 July 1913. Artists' Files, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON. "Mr Jackson" is A.Y. Jackson (1882-1974), of Group of Seven fame (Joan Murray, Helen McNicoll, 1879-1915: Oil Paintingsfrom the Estate [Toronto: Morris Gallery, 1974]). 14 Luckyj, 44. 71

It is appropriate to look to ethnography to understand this type of cross-cultural and cross-class relationship, and view the rural artist colony as a site analogous to "the field." James Clifford discusses the field as a site of "participant-observation" that is treated as a "home away from home,,15 by the researcher. Nina Lübbren agrees with this

analogy, stating that the artist' s desire for authentic experience, and the perception that the painting represented an eye-witness account of country life to the urban audience

were paramount elements of rural art colony artist practice.16 Clifford states that the field

as a model of study reflects "a modernistlurban configuration of the 'primitive' object of

study as romantic, pure, threatened, archaic, [and] simple. ,,17 We may apply this to art

production in the countryside as weIl.

Indeed locals were treated with an ethnographie interest by artists, although we

should remember, as Nina Lübbren notes, that "[t]hese artists were not in the countryside

in order to study and document the locals, they were there to paint them. Ethnographie

details were mobilized only if they served the purposes of the picture. ,,18 This is most

evident in the desire to paint local geographic peculiarities (dams in Holland, for

instance), rural rituals (such as festivals, weddings, or funerals), and especially, peasant

costume, best exemplified in images of Brittany. We may look to Gauguin's The Vision

After the Sermon (1888) (fig. 24) as one example. The image depicts a group of Breton

women at a Pardon (a type of festival) ostensibly watching Jacob wrestling with an angel,

although we know that wrestling was also one of the main attractions of the Pardon. 19

l' James Clifford, "Travelling Cultures," Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 96-116 (New York and London: Routledge, 1992),99. 16 Lübbren, 39-40. 17 Clifford, 98. 18 Lübbren, 44. 19 Orton and Pollock, 338. 72

Orton and Pollock state that by transforming the activity into a biblical subject, Gauguin is removing the festival from a specifie time and place, and reconstructing it as a timeless

ritual.20 Pollock states elsewhere,

It is unprecedented to demand that a painting manage to function as both an image of a possible gathering of women from a specifie French region and the projection of their overheated religious experience. 1 suggest it can only work through the position of the spectator, proposed as a metropolitan and probably masculine viewer, positioned in utter difference from the peasant women, who are made 'exotic' by their costuming and are further de-realized through Gauguin's stylistic gambits which medievalize and orientalize their faces. 2i

Just as the women gaze upon the wrestling match, the artist and viewer (and, we can

imagine, the tourist observing the festival) gaze upon them, the women "othered" by their

distinct costumes. The women in the painting are aIl clad in black dresses, with starched

white caps covering their heads and shoulders. Brettell and Brettell note that "[t]hese

starched white caps seem to symbolize, more than anything else, the cultural purity and

religious spirit which came to be identified with this population of Western France, a

population surviving in an increasingly modern and anticlerical world.,,22 This interest in

costume as evidence for the conservative, archaic, anti-modern values of a disappearing

community was both powerful and mistaken; these costumes were not traditional and

timeless at ail: only after the sumptuary laws for costume were lifted in France after the

French Revolution-Iess than a century before Gauguin put brush to canvas-did these

costumes find a place in Breton society. 23

Dean MacCannell finds this desire for a timeless, authentic past as one of the key

markers of modern tourism:

200rton and Pollock, 338-39. 21 Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888-1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992),56. 22 Brettell and Brettell, 68. 23 Brettell and Brettell, 66; Orton and Pollock, 326-27. 73

The progress of modernity ... depends on its very sense of instability and inauthenticity. For moderns, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere: in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles. In other words, the concern of moderns for' naturalness,' their nostalgia, and their search for authenticity are not merely casual and somewhat decadent, though harmless, attachments to the souvenirs of destroyed cultures and dead epochs. They are also components of the conquering spirit of modernity - the grounds of its unifying consciousness.24

Vision After the Sermon embodies this search for authenticity. Gauguin's painting (even without regard to its style), along with the others examined in this chapter, should thus be considered modern.

This desire for a "romantic, pure, threatened, archaic, [and] simple" native population was also apparent in England, where Helen McNicoll worked. Karen Sayer notes that with the increase of industrialization and urbanization (and the perceived disease, corruption, and over-crowding that accompanied these trends), people looked to the countryside "to find the remainder of the pure, strong, healthy English stock they needed to revitalize society;,,25 upon discovery that this timeless perfect countryside no longer existed (if it ever did), they felt the need to catalogue it, examine it, and "explore the rurallike an alien land.,,26 This is apparent in artists' and journalists' accounts of

Cornwall. W. Christian Symons enumerates the 'foreign' characteristics of Newlyn, including the everyday activities of fishwives going to market and men working at sea,

the types of boats, the economy, the history of the town (selectively including Aigerian

pirate attacks and Spanish invasions), and the different language.27 For Symons, the

women of the village provide another safely exotic sight: Newlyn is "famous for its pretty

n1 24 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory o/the Leisure Class, 3 edition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999),3. 2S Sayer, 179. 26 Sayer, 179. 27 Symons, 200-3. 74 women, their complexion being very fair, clear white and red, with dark eyes and hair. It is supposed that a blending of Spanish blood did, in no small degree, help to bring about this charming combination."28 Unfortunately for painters in search of the romantic past, women in Cornwall didn't wear traditional costume, and artists such as Frank Richards

(1863-1935) even criticized them for being too clean and fashionable.29 Here then, as in

Brittany, the "otherness' of a site was mapped onto the bodies of rural women.

Griselda Pollock has examined this process, with regard to the racialization of the working-classes. Even more than costume, work itself was seen on the bodies of rural subjects, apparent in dirty, tanned, or burnt skin, developed muscles, and messy hair, among other things. Pollock writes that the more these signs were made to be seen as natural characteristics of these bodies-this is the role of representation in this process- the more that the social and economic circumstances behind this work is erased. Working peasants came to be seen not only as a different class, but as an entirely separate race altogether, able to be positioned as "other," in opposition to the representing body (or audience). This, in turn, leads, as we have seen, to the possibility of "objective" study, and further, to moral judgement?O

The racialization of the rural working class is apparent in artists' own accounts.

Stanhope Forbes, discussing Cornwall, writes, "Nature has lavished aIl her care on the landscape here about, but has buitt up a race of people weIl knit and comely, fit

28 Symons, 199-200. 29 Michael Jacobs, The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985), 144-46. 30 Griselda Pollock, '''With My Own Eyes:' Fetishism, the Labouring Body and the Colour of its Sex," Art History 17, no. 3 (September 1994): 354. 75 inhabitants of such a region.'>3l Laura Knight, in reference to Staithes, uses similar language, discussing "the wild race offisherpeople [she] loved so well,"32 and "the strange race of people who lived there, whose stern almost forbidding exterior formed such a contrast to the warmth and richness of their natures.'m By referring to the workers as a distinct race, these artists overtly mark them as "other." Knight's final comment makes it clear that the marking of difference between herself and the locals happens at the site of the labouring body - "the stern almost forbidding exterior." *** The evocative figure of the peasant helped to construct and maintain middle-class values; representations of the rural working class say more about the upper- and middle- class producers and audience of these images than about the class being represented. As we have seen, the peasant occupied the space of the "other," against which the middle- and upper-classes could define themselves, and, as such, representations of the peasant figure came to embody the values (both good and bad) of the representing class. The mythology of the peasant - briefly, "that people are happier in the countryside, that country people are more virtuous, and that country people were more virtuous and happy in the past than they are now"34 - was particularly potent in late-nineteenth-century

England, where it took on very specific values in order to combat the perceived corruption of the city and new industrial towns: virtues such as "industriousness, sobriety,

31 Mrs. Lionel Birch, Stanhope A. Forbes ARA and Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes, ARWS (London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne: Cassell and Company, 1906),29. 32 Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936), 161. 33 Knight 75. Upon looking at the entirety of Knight's oeuvre, it appears that she had a distinct interest in depicting "the other," whether in terms of race, class, or gender. Her later works portray such diverse subjects asblack children in Baltimore, circus performers, gypsies, and women factory workers during World War II. 34 Payne, Toil and Plenty, 24. 76 piety, domestic affection, and deference to rank. ,,35 Nina Lübbren goes so far to say that

"painted peasants were even more bourgeois than the real bourgeoisie, or more precisely, they represented an ideal state of Bürgerlichkeit, or 'bourgeoisdom,' which the nineteenth-century urban bourgeoisie longed for or imagined to have IOSt.,,36 These values were to be read on the bodies of rural working women. *** Linda Nochlin states that "the peasant woman ... insofar as she was poor, passive, natural, and understood to be content with her God-given role as mother and nurturer, served as an ideal vehicle ... for an ideological definition offemininity."37 The lower- class rural woman was an extremely effective symbol of femininity (as defined by the

Victorian upper- and middle-classes), as she represented a compelling "conjunction of

ideals:,,38 those of woman as the natural moral centre of the family and the countryside as

the natural, ideal site to rai se such a family. In this way, "the ideology of separate spheres

is validated as part of a natural order.'>39 Leonore Davidoff, Jean L'Esperance, and

Howard Newby have examined the way in which the ideal home and family were

removed to the supposedly perfect countryside in this time of increased imperial

expansion, industrialization, and urbanization as a "response to the need for imposing

order in an increasingly troublesome, impersonal, and alienating real world;'>40 through

35 Payne, Toit and Plenty, 24. This myth was accompanied by an equally powerful anti-myth: the countryside was also seen as old-fashioned, dirty, and as a "centre of poverty and backwards promiscuity" (Nead, 39), and its inhabitants as rude, uncultured savages (Brettell and Brettell, 58-9). 36 Lübbren, 55. 37 Linda Nochlin, Representing Women (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999),85. 38 Sayer, 176. 39 Nead, 42. 40 Leonore Davidoff, Jean L'Esperance, and Howard Newby, "Landscape with Figures: Home and Community in English Society," in The Rights and Wrongs ofWomen, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley, 139-75 (New York: Penguin, 1976), 143. 77 the construction of the rural idyll-with the woman at the centre of the myth - traditional values of authority, hierarchy, and patriarchy were upheld.41

The ideal of the rural woman as the natural centre of the family and the perfect wife and mother fed into a developing discourse on maternalism which dictated that it was women' s dutY to raise many strong, healthy children. In this period of competitive colonial expansion, this imperative was not only seen as a facet of domestic ideology, but as a matter of national security.42 Moreover, as scholars such as Sally Ledger and

Deborah Epstein Nord have shown, this essentially racist ideology was not limited to

conservative thinkers; rather, it was taken up by women in aIl walks of life as a feminist

position which celebrated the value of women's "work.'>43

This discourse of rural femininity was mapped onto women' s bodies in

representations of the period. We may look to George Elgar Hicks's (1824-1914) The

Sinews of otd England (1857) (fig. 25) as evidence for this kind of propaganda. Hicks' s

image depicts a family on the doorstep of their country cottage, "literally on the threshold

41 Davidoff, L'Esperance, and Newby, 143-46. 42 Sayer, 173-79. For the seminal article on the relationship between maternity and Empire, see Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History Workshop, 5 (Spring 1978): 9-68. 43 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997),69; Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995),213-14. While we wou Id Iike to think of early feminist activists as anti-colonial, this was most often not the case: "Victorian culture was underpinned by a strong sense of national and racial superiority, which was in turn based on Britain' s imperial status. Middle-c1ass Victorian feminists generaIly shared these assumptions, often identifying their cause with the Bri,tish imperial mission. Feminists were able to exploit ideological assumptions about women' s superior moral strength to enable themselves to take up imperial service in the name of Victorian womanhood. Women's roles as nurturers, child-carers, preservers of purity, could ail be put to use as part of the wider imperialist project (Ledger 64). For an in-depth examination of the complex relationshp between gender, race, domesticity, and imperialism, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, . Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). For an interesting take on these relationships in the nineteenth-century American context, see Amy Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity," American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 581-606. 78 between male and female spheres.,,44 The figures are idealized: the husband is clean and strong, throwing the pick-axe over his shoulder as though it weighs nothing at ail. The baby boy, too, is clean, with tidy clothes and skin, and shoes on his feet, although he is also gendered through a reference to work: he plays with a small shovel, foreshadowing his future as a labourer like his father. It is the woman's body which makes the idealization most apparent. Although it seems that Hicks means to show that the woman will also be working (performing domestic labour) by depicting her with her sleeves rolled up and the front of her dress tucked under,45 it is certainly a romantic vision of

work: she wears a clean dress, and her hair is shiny and neat. She is small: her feet,

pointed toward her husband's, appear dainty next to his, and bis arm goes around her

waist easily. Her arm is bared from the elbow, showing smooth, pale, and clean skin: this

is not a labouring body.

The painting relies on the juxtaposition of the woman' s body next to her

husband's for its meaning. Their respective gazes are telling: the man looks out into th~

world, white the woman gazes adoringly up at her husband. The man is clearly on his

way to work outside the home, his identity marked by the tools of his trade (the axe),

while the wife is confined to the domestic sphere, here allied with the maternai role

through "the imagery of wholesomeness, fecundity, and passivity signaled by an

abundance of flowering and climbing plants. ,>4(; Susan P. Casteras links the cleanliness of

44Tim Barringer, "The Gendering of Artistic Labour in Mid-Victorian Britain," in Representations of Gender from Prehistory to the Present, ed. Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe, 153-67 (London: MacMillan Press, 2000),154. 45 Nead, 43. 46 Barringer, 154-55. 79 her dress, body, and home to her "aspir[ation] to he a good housewife,,~7 and her tidy kitchen, with tea set on the table and china displayed on shelves supports this idea. This is an image of the ideal family: a hard-working husband, a devoted and dutiful wife, and a happy, healthy-white and male-chitd, ail situated in the pure, perfect countryside.48 *** The flip side of this construction of ideal womanhood was a warning for bourgeois women: "at the same time that the peasant-woman was viewed as naturally nurturing and pious, her very naturalness, her proximity to instinct and animality could make her serve as the epitome of untrammeled, unartificed, or 'healthful' sexuality. ,~9

White this remained in contrast to the "corrupt, damaged eroticism of the urban working- class girl," the peasant woman or girl as sexual object remained an extremely popular trope, tied to "the belief that degradation and immorality would be visible in the physical appearance of the body."so

Lynda Nead has shown that the Victorian construction of femininity was partly buitt around notions of health and sexuality. The ideal female was "inherently weak, delicate, and in a perpetuaI state of sickness,,,Sl aU the better to keep he.r in a state of dependency to the men in her life. This body was positioned in opposition to the

47 Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987), 30. 481t should be noted that this ideal was not only constructed by male artists. One of the most prolific creators of this idyllic rural image was English artist Helen Allinghrun (1848-1926). Allingham's watercolour depictions of rural women and quaint cottages were extremely popular, gaining notice in exhibitions, joumals, and even a book dedicated to her workentitled Happy England (published in 1903). For more on Allingham's rural subjects, see Anne Helmreich, "The Marketing of Helen Allingham: The English Cottage and National Identity," in Gendering Landscape Art, ed. Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins, 45-60 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 49 Nochlin, 86. 50 Pollock, "With My Own Eyes," 362. SI Nead, 29. 80

"healthy, hardy, and robust,,52 working woman. In her study of anorexia in Victorian

England, Joan Jacob Brumberg shows that this line of thinking was the norm. She explores the complex relationship between class, gender, sexuality, and body, and states,

In the effort to set themselves apart from plowboys and milkmaids-that is, working and rural youth-middle-class daughters chose to pursue a body configuration that was small, slim, and essentially decorative. By eating only tiny amounts of food, young women could disassociate themselves from sexuality and fecundity and they could achieve an unambiguous class identity.53

The celebration of physical weakness in opposition to health and strength now seems contradictory, for as Brumberg states, "[t]he thin body not only implied asexuality and an elevated social address, it was also an expression of intelligence, sensitivity, and morality.'ô4 Lynda Nead agrees: "[a]lthough the respectable woman was represented in terms of physical frailty, she was also understood in relation to physical/moral soundness.

This contradiction also applied to definitions of the working-class woman who was not only seen as robust and healthy but also as a source of infection and disease. ,,55 The link to sexuality and sexual desire is significant: a healthy, independent woman's body was

"unnatural, it signified boldness and sexual deviancy.,,56

Although it may not be immediately obvious to the twenty-first-century viewer, peasant women' s bodies were often extremely sexualized in representations of their labour. Linda Nochlin notes that "[r]uddy peasant skin, when ladies were white; firm peasant muscles, when ladies weredainty; uncorseted peasant bodies, when ladies were

52 Nead, 29. 53 Joan Jacob Brumberg, "The Appetite as Voice," in Food and Culture, ed. Mary Anne Schofield, 159-79 (Bowling Green, OH.: Bowling Green State University Press, 1997), 173. 54 Brumberg, 173-74. sSNead,30. S6Nead,28. 81 corseted and carapaced; bare feet and legs when women's ankles were always covered: aIl of these things were sexually provocative in ways that are lost to us today.,,57

Examples of this objectification of rural working women's and girls' bodies are numerous; Les Foins (1878) (fig. 26), by Jules Bastien Lepage (1848-84) is one of the most well-known. Bastien Lepage depicts a young woman, seated on the ground, seemingly after a long day of work. Her legs are stretched out in front of her, and slightly apart, her skirt revealing her ankles and part of her legs. Her arms are completely bare up to her elbows, and her shirt is low cut. The girl's hair is swept back out of her face, showing parted lips and tanned, even sunburnt, skin. While the subject of the painting is ostensibly the harvest, the presence of the man laid out sleeping beside her makes the viewer think that they may be exhausted after another, less wholesome, activity. Critics agreed: Les Foins caused a sensation in England where it was shown in 1880, with The

Illustrated London News calling the girl "'[a] pure descendant of the primeval Eve, as first evolved from the gorilla"SS This animalization is an extreme interpretation of the girl's 'natural' sexuality. *** Helen McNicoIl' s images of rural women do not fall into either of these categories. McNicoll painted many images of rural workers, and virtually aIl of the

subjects are women and girls.59 Her paintings both fit into the context of modern tourism

57 Nochlin, 87-88. Charmaine Nelson has noted that the term "ruddy" was "often deployed in the nineteenth century to describe the complexion of inter-racial bodies" (Charmaine Nelson, "White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro: Signifying Blackness in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Neoclassical Sculpture," RACAR 27, no. 1-2 [2000]: 89). Skin colour is here invoked as a sign of c1ass difference, but serves the same purpose of marking the "other" woman's body as exotic and sexualised. SB Kenneth McConkey, "The Bouguereau of the Naturalists: Bastien Lepage and British Art," Art History 1, no. 3 (September 1978): 374. 59 ln my research into McNicoll' s oeuvre, 1 have found only two paintings-F eeding Time (c. 1907) and Midsummer (c. 1909)-that have rural working men as subjects. 82 as an ethnographie activity attempting to capture the unfamiliar on canvas, and go beyond the traditional ways of depicting rural women. Natalie Luckyj states that McNicoll's images "reveal subtle moments of womanhood and childhood that acknowledge her preoccupation with the lived reality of rural working women.',oo Luckyj does not state that a representation of "lived reality" is itself a contest to traditional ways of depicting peasant women, and a challenge to myths offemininity. Moreover, it runs counter to the perception of McNicoll' s work as demonstrating a "heartfelt and deeply experienced nostalgia for an art that communicated values of an earlier time.,~l

McNicoll's The Apple Gatherer (1911) (fig. 19) is a representative image. Praised by William R. Watson when it was exhibited in the AAM's Spring Exhibition in 1911 as one of the "delightfully sunshiney pictures of which Miss McNicoll is now an almost perfect master ,'~2 The Apple Gatherer is very different than the images of rural women discussed earlier in tbis chapter. The subject of McNicoll's work is a Ione woman picking apples in an orchard.63 Maria Tippett limits her description of the painting to formalist terms, saying only that it "might possess a limited palette and maintain a rational perspective, yet its vigourous brushwork, its vivid yellows and greens and its combination of stilllife-the basket in the foreground-with landscape and portraiture evinces its Impressionist influence.,,64 Tippett criticizes the subject matter as an

"uneventful moment in an apple orchard during the harvest,,,65 but neglects the fact that it

60 Luckyj, 57. 61 Luckyj, 13. 62 William R. Watson, "Artists' Work of High Order," Montreal Gazette, March 10, 1911. 7. 63 Natalie Luckyj notes that The Apple Gatherer may have been painted during one of McNicoll's stays in St. Ives; her teacher Algernon Talmage offered figure classes in local orchards (42). Other works painted during these sessions might include Picking Apples (c. 1910) and Apple Time (date unknown). 64 Maria Tippett, By a Lady: Celebrating Three Centuries ofArt by Canadian Women (Toronto: Viking, 1992),48. 65 Tippett, 48. 83 is precisely because this is an uneventful, quotidian moment that the painting is compelling. This is not a romantic view of a woman at work, and it thus stands in contrast to the vast majority of images of peasant women. McNicoll' s removal of the figure from the mythological realm into the everyday is an important gesture, and one which signais her resistance to the ideals of femininity.

MéNicoll gives the figure monumentality. We might contrast her apple picker, for example, with the figures in Camille Pissarro's (1830-1903) Apple Picking at Eragny

(1888) (fig. 27). Here several men and women work together, and none are accorded much personality or weight. Indeed, Pissarro's almost pointillist style makes the figures seem light, airy, and utterly enmeshed in the field surrounding them. In contrast, the woman' s body takes up the whole of the middle of The Apple Gatherer, and she is neither Iight, nor airy: although her body is modestly covered, we know that she is healthy and hearty because the basket she is tending to is nearly as large as her-she would have to be strong to carry it. She is represented in the act of labour: her pose, with her arms up in the air, her back curved uncomfortably, is hard to sustain and will no doubt make her body ache at the end of the day. We also know that she has been doing this for a while, as her large basket is nearly full, and her cheeks are sunburnt, or red with heat, even though it appears that she is now working in the shade. Yet while there are signs of work on her body, the woman is not sexualized like the girl in Les Foins. This is simply a representation of her daily work.

Unlike Pissaro's apple pickers, this figure is al one, with no men in sight.

Moreover, there is no evidence of a homestead or cottage in the background: she has been separated from what was is assumed to be her natural sphere. She is an example of the 84 contradiction that Karen Sayer discusses: while rural women were supposed to be the most pure examples of motherhood, many also had to "abandon" their children and housekeeping to go outside the home to work.66 Outside employment was, of course, the most questionable thing a woman could do: it "was generally deemed a menace ... because such work took her away from her role as sustainer of the family and transformed her into a social being, a human creature potentially in touch with wider issues and capable of conscious activism.,,67 With no indication (e.g. a run-down cottage in the background, tattered clothes, a child at her feet) that she needs to work to support herself or her family-the only acceptable reason for a woman to work68-and as a monumental, realistic, solitary figure of the woman working, 1 contend that The Apple

Gatherer might just be read in such a potentially feminist way.

The Little Worker (fig. 20), painted by McNicoli in 1907 also reflects a challenge to the tradition al view of the peasantry. The kind of painting that may have resulted from a posing session with a young model as seen in the photographs discussed earlier in this chapter, The Little Worker is one of several McNicoll images that depict young girls at work in the countryside.69 The figure of the young girl in this image is unlike her peers in the work of an artist such as Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905), exemplified in his image The Broken Pitcher (1891) (fig. 28). The subject of the latter painting is a young girl, posing with her arms and ankles bared, her skin tanned, and cheeks red with

sun. This image of a single female figure is characteristic of Bouguereau: "Most often they represent an isolated female figure, and she generally looks, often piteously, straight

66 Sayer, 178. 67 Nochlin, 83. 68 Nochlin, 82 69 See also Gathering Flowers (1911) (fig. 7) and Picking Berries (1910). 85 out into the viewer' s eyes. In sorne cases, she is placed in an awkward or dangerous situation and seems to implore the viewer to save her from her plight. ,,70 This image is no exception; the young girl's pitcher is broken, and her eyes beg for sympathy. This type of gaze immediately puts the viewer in a position of power over the young girl. Her posture-seated, with her head tilted to one side, her arms stretched out and clasped in an almost pleading gesture, and her legs, again slightly parted - further enhances this viewing position. Brettell and Brettell see this as "an almost voyeuristic portrayal of the vulnerability and seductiveness of the peasant girl, young and as yet unspoiled by the

ravages of rurallabour.'m Indeed, this is a prettified, romantic view of a peasant girl: her

arms, legs and feet are remarkably clean, her hair just a tad disheveled, and her clothing

neat and tidy. She is, therefore, a very safe object of attraction, looking just enough like a

lady to be a legitimate object of desire, but her class, signified by the signs of her body

and dress, allows the viewer to glimpse "actual human sexuality.'m

McNicoll's Little Worker, however, is not sexualized in the slightest; on the

contrary, her work is given respect through the seriousness of expression and appearance

of effort accorded to the girl by the artist. The figure is walking down a hill, wading

through tall grass with a large, and apparently heavy bucket of water. The weight of the

bucket is conveyed through the girl's position: she is tilted to one side, with her other arm

out to balance herself. The col ours and brushstrokes used by McNicoll give the

appearance of a hot, windy day73-the bright yellows glint off her hair and dress, while

the grass appears to blow in the breeze-giving the viewer a further sense of her difficult

70 Bretten and Bretten, 109. 71 Bretten and Bretten, 108. 72 Bretten and Bretten, 107. 73 Luckyj, 48. 86 labour. While Bastien Lepage and Bouguereau have followed W. Christian Symons's note about artists in Cornwall making sure that "great care is taken to make the women barefooted and ankled, not to say legged,"74 McNicoll has depicted her subject fully clothed, with heavy boots on her feet-much more practical for field work.

She is quite far away from the farmstead seen in the uppermost part of the painting, which she presumably has had to walk from, and will have to climb back up to, something which is emphasized by the perspective used by McNicoll, which places the viewer at the bottom of the hill, looking up the slope. This image, together with the photographs examined earlier, gives an interesting hint at the independence-and, on the flip side, responsibility-that farm children must have had in comparison to their urban middle- and upper-class peers. The child model (and her painted counterpart) are far away from home and family-in the presence of strangers-and contributing to the family income (the Little Worker through her labour, the girl through the payment she

presumably would have received for modelling). Christiana Payne notes that this

independence was common in rural families: "[c]hildren worked in the fields as soon as

they were able to, from nine or ten years of age, perhaps even from seven," white others

stayed home to care for their younger brothers and sisters while their parents worked

outside the home.75 Luckyj says that these images of "[f]emale children who take on

familial responsibilities ... imply social difference.,,76

The Gleaner (c. 1908) (fig. 21) is perhaps McNicoll's most interesting challenge

to the mythologies of femininity and rural romanticism, and offers an interesting

perspective on the goals of modern tourism. The large painting again depicts a lone

74 Symons, 205. 75 Payne, Toit and Plenty, 7. 76 Luckyj, 57. 87 woman, this time located in a bamyard, carrying a large bundle of hay. Like The Apple

Gatherer, we may read the signs of the woman's work on her body: while she is young and pretty, her hair is tied up in a messy bun, her face and neck tanned and bumt from a long day in the sun, and her once-dainty hand clenched with strength around the heavy bundle. Rer body is tilted to the si de to support the weight of the hay. She is fully dressed, her sleeves coming down aIl the way to her wrists, and her bodice up to her neck. The fruits of her labour have totally obscured the rest of her body. Once again, though, her body is not treated as a sexual object.

Gleaning was an important economic activity for the poor, allowing impoverished, non-land-owning workers to gather leftover crops after the harvest.

Gleaning was known to be "traditionally the way the poorest and weakest members of rural society were permitted to obtain their bread;"n it was also well-known as women's work. Gleaning was seen as an independent act for the peasant, and a traditional act of charity by the landowner, enshrined in the Bible in the Book of Ruth.78 Rowever, over the course of the nineteenth century, gleaning slowly died out in England, its death largely seen as a result of the encroachment of city values of capitalism and commercialism over traditional country paternalism.79

In keeping with this traditional view, the majority of images of gleaners conform to the values involved in rural mythology, ideals such as happiness, purity, and the

naturalness of work and poverty for the lower classes. 80 One thinks of Jean-François

77 Nochlin, 92. 78 Christiana Payne, "Boundless Harvests: Representations of Open Fields and Gleaning in Early­ Nineteenth-Century England," Turner Studies 11, no. 1 (1991): 7. See Ruth 2. 79 Payne "Boundless Harvests," 7-8. 80 Gleaning was an extremely popular subject for the painter's brush: Christiana Payne posits that up to 20% of paintings shown at the RA and Old Watercolour Society in the first half of the nineteenth century 88

Millet's (1814-1875) iconic The Gleaners (1857) (fig. 29): although the women in the painting cannot be said to be particularly happy, they are most certainly integrated into the landscape in a way which makes their labour seem natural and pre-ordained: the curves of their bodies mimic the haystacks in the field behind them, and the dark, muted col ours of their dresses give the impression that their bodies blend into the dark ground beneath them. Linda Nochlin has also noted that their bodies are entirely enclosed by the landscape-the head of the woman on the right only rises to the horizon line-making it seem as though the workers are "effortlessly incorporated into the natural order.,.st

Nochlin also says of Millet's Gleaners that the artist "chose, by ennobling the poses and assimilating the figures to biblical and classical prototypes, to remove them from the politically charged context of contemporary history and ta place them in the transhistoric context of high art. ,,82 Robert L. Herbert makes note of the modern farm hidden in the background of the painting, and its use as "the foil for the timeless labour of the gleaners.,,83 It is clear that tbis depiction is in keeping with the ideals of modern tourism, the workers examined as remnants of a past, ideal society, in the same way as Gauguin's

women at the Pardon.

It is in this respect that McNicoll's Gleaner differs so significantly from the

image's predecessors. The woman is not out in the field, "incorporated into the natural

order:" she is working at the farm, surrounded by buildings, which not only removes her

from nature, but places her more concretely in the traditionally masculine realm of

depicted gleaners, and Cornhill Magazine stated in 1865 that gleaners were "a class of people dearer to the artist, be her poet or painter, than they are to the farmer or sportsman" (Payne, "Boundless Harvests," 12). 81 Nochlin, 93. 82 Nochlin, 92-93. 83 Robert L. Herbert, "City vs. Country: The Rural Image in French Painting from Millet to Gauguin," ArtForum 8 (February 1970): 49. 89 economic productivity. McNicoll's choice of gleaning as a subject matter is interesting: by the time McNicoll was working, gleaning would no longer have been a common activity. One might read this choice, then, as McNicoll buying into the rural myth.

However, 1 would suggest an alternative feminist interpretation: McNicoll may have depicted a gleaner because the gleaner was a recognizably independent, self-sufficient, working female figure, just like herself. *** These paintings may not appear to twenty-first-century eyes to be particularly controversial or revolutionary, however, looking back to the tradition McNicoll was working in, it is obvious that there is more to be seen than first meets the eye. We should remember that her images may have been a bigger challenge to the feminine ideal in

Canada, McNicoll's primary site of exhibition:

In Canada's new urban centres, feminine gentility functioned as a marker of cultural sophistication. Far fewer Canadian than British women worked outside the home, and the British domestic ideal gained particular currency in a society where the economic and demographic realities of settlement had added special urgency to women's unpaid domestic work and their reproductive labour.84

Thus, an image that seems benign to us today may in fact have been an important statement of resistance when considered in its original context.

Furthermore, a look at a scrapbook Helen McNicoll kept when she was young may provide further insight into her intentions or motivation. One page of her scrapbook

(fig. 30), begun when McNicoll was fourteen years old, shows several clippings of images of rural women in very traditional depictions of rural femininity: a woman calling her family home to dinner, women looking romantically pensive in an outdoor setting,

84 Huneault, "Impressions of Difference," 219. 90 and an image entitled "Maternity" which juxtaposes a mother and child with a cow and her calf. Kristina Huneault says that "[w ]hen Helen McNicoll was fourteen she c1early knew and responded to a story in which women married, had babies, and experienced their brief moments of independence in Iight of their past and future relations with men."S51 would argue that this evidence of an old interest in the traditional depiction of femininity and maternity shows a conscious choice on the part of the artist to move away from these images, to challenge and contest the pictures and ideas she was interested in when she was younger.

Finally, the phenomenon of modern tourism provides another way of looking at these images of working women, and one which shows that McNicoll was not only challenging the myths offemininity, but also that she was firmly ensconced within modernity. Griselda Pollock posits that tourism is the ideal way to understand artists' images of rural women: "What else is it but tourism that takes us to the place of the

'other' and subjects it to our "othering" gaze, where we are geographically distant from home, but also ideologically distanced from the 'other' despite actual proximity.'>86 This is an explicitly modern practice, she argues: "What is seen by the tourist becomes modern precisely because the social relations governing the encounter are displaced by representation of the concrete social scene as a spectacle, a spectacle of difference.'087

Dean MacCannell has said that "whenever industrial society is transformed into modern society, work is simultaneously transformed into an object of touristic curiosity."SS While MacCannell centres his discussion on urban work, exploring the surge

8S Huneault, "Impressions of Difference," 232. 86 Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 60. ff7 Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 60. 88 MacCannell, 6. 91 in interest in Paris at the turn of the century in tourist attractions like factories, morgues, sewers, and printing offices, among other things,89 we may certainly apply this to the depictions of many artists working in rural artists' colonies at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, including those of Helen McNicoll.

MacCannell states "[t]ouristic consciousness is motivated by its desire for authentic experiences,"90 which brings us back around to our discussion of ethnographic / anthropological interest in the locals living alongside artists in colonies. He proposes that the interest in rurallife may be seen through this lens, because "[p]rimitive sociallife is nearly totally exposed to outsiders who happen to be present. Perhaps sorne of our love for primitives is attached to this innocent openness."91 MacCannell also brings into his discussion Erving Goffman' s idea of front and back regions of space, where one shows a life performed for an outside public, and the other, the back region, is the authentic, real,

lived experience of the locals to which the tourist has limited access.92 These ideas infuse

new meaning into a work such as McNicoll's A Welcome Breeze (c. 1909) (fig. 31), in

which a woman hangs laundry on a line in her backyard. A work traditionally read in terms of women's domestic labour and femininity, the work of MacCannell and Goffman

open it up to the question of not only the subject, but also the observer. Here, as in the

other paintings we have examined, McNicoll has access to the back regions of a peasant

woman's life. She is an active observer. This painting positions McNicoll as a tourist, a

thoroughly modern role which allows her to take on a mobile, independent identity often

denied her by scholars looking for evidence of the feminine sensibility in her work.

89 MacCannell, 57-76. 90 MacCannell, 101. 91 MacCannell, 49. 92 MacCannell, 92-96. 92

CONCLUSION

The Fruit Vendor (c. 1910) (fig. 32) is one offew paintings by Helen McNicoll that situates a female figure in an urban environment. 1 The image depicts a woman seated next to a produce stand, preparing a basket of lettuce to sell alongside an assortment of other fruits and vegetables. She appears to be selling her wares in a city or town: the tall buildings and paved street indicate a site larger and wealthier than a small country village.

As in so many of McNicoll' s images, the dominant feeling is that of silence, here made aIl the more acute by the urban setting, which one would expect to be busy and loud. The fruit vendor is not al one in the space: a woman walks away from the fruit stand, her back to the viewer, and a young girl holding two buckets passes her. The three figures, seemingly absorbed in their individuallabours, do not acknowledge one another or the viewer. However, just because the figures are silent does not mean that the painting is. While the association of women with fruit is a popular theme in the history of Western art, it is put to different use here. Compare McNicoIl's image to Gauguin's Woman

Holding a Fruit (Where Are You Going?) (1893) (fig. 33), for example.2 Gauguin's model holds a round melon up against her body, the shape of the fruit mimicking the shape of her exposed breast. The connotations of naturalness, abundance, and fertility are clear. McNicoIl's painting is strikingly different. The relationship between woman and

1 Similar paintings include Marketplace (1910) and The Market Cart, Brittany (1910). McNicoll also painted several urban scenes in Montreal and Venice. 2 We might equally look to Gauguin's Two Tahitian Women with Mangos (1899) or Portrait ofa Negro Slave (1786) by Canadian artist François de Beaucourt (1740-1794) as images that imply exoticism and sexuality through a juxtaposition of fruit and the female body. 93 fruit here is not one that implies natural femininity and procreativity; on the contrary, the

scale hanging over the woman' s head reminds the viewer that this is a site of economic

exchange: this woman is located in the traditionally masculine public sphere.

Unlike the exposed and curvaceous feminine body depicted by Gauguin, the fruit

seller' s body is heavy, her cIothing bulky, and her face and hands, sunburnt. It is evident

that she works outside. While she might currently be in the space of a city, it is likely that

she lives and works elsewhere, bringing her wares in from the country si de to sell to an

urban market. As such, The Fruit Vendor brings together the main points of this thesis.

Helen McNicoll moved back and forth from country to city, travelling between rural sites

of production and urban sites of exhibition, traversing boundaries of geography and

gender. This mobility, read through the lens oftourism, positions McNicoll as an

independent woman and a fundamentally modern artist.

My discussion of McNicoIl's work has been marked by a constant negotiation

between centre and periphery. This issue appears in several different ways in a study of

McNicoIl' s life and work: as a deaf woman living and working at the turn of the

twentieth century, she was doubly marginalized by her disability and her gender. As an

artist who worked in Europe and exhibited in Canada, she was both "rather an English

painter" and "always a Canadian,,,3 and simultaneously, neither. Because of these reasons

(among others), McNicoIl and her work have been marginalized by Canadian and

modernist art history. Although weIl known and admired during her Iifetime, recognition

of her work has since been extremely limited. Erased from the canonical texts of

Canadian art history, and essentialized as a "feminine" (and therefore unmodern and

3 "Pictures and Sketches by Helen Galloway McNicoll at the Art Association," Montreal Daily Star, November Il, 1925. 4. For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Kristina Huneault, "Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoll," Art History 27, no. 2 (April 2004): 212-49. 94 uninteresting) artist by those surveys which have included her work, McNicoll has only in the last five years begun to be recognized for her contributions to Canadian art, and for the potentially feminist positions that her images adopt.

This thesis has examined Helen McNicoll's many images of the rural outdoors, which, 1 have shown, can be read as both explicitly feminist and essentially modern.

Chapter 1 explored the phenomenon of the rural artist colony as a site of modern art production. Chapters 2 and 3 examined sorne of the subjects McNicoll painted while she was resident in these colonies, or on other travels around the European countryside. 1 have attempted to show that while these subjects-Iandscapes and rural working women, in particular-are often seen as old-fashioned, nostalgic yearnings for another era, when read within the context of tourism in which they were painted, they appear as modern in ways that are not now recognized as such.

McNicoll' s preference for rural subject matter also placed her at the peripheries of an historical tradition that has privileged the urban. The work of Mary Louise Pratt lends an enlightening perspective. Pratt looks at travel writing in the nineteenth century in the context of the ethnographie phenomenon of "transculturation." Usually referred to as a description of "how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture,'>4 Pratt asks instead how the centre can by defined by its peripheries:

The entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the ioside out. Cao this be said of its modes of representation? While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery ... it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis-

4 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992),6. 95

beginning perhaps, with the latter' s obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself.5

Although Pratt is discussing these ideas in a colonial context, we might equally apply them to the country-city dichotomy with which we have come into conflict.6 As such, they offer new insight into Helen McNicoll's oeuvre: rather than being seen as old- fashioned and nostalgic, we may read her images of cornfields and apple pickers as both constructing and representing a complex relationship with the urban centre.

As a tourist, Helen McNicoll travelled back and forth between centre and periphery. This mobility is a key way of understanding the artist as an independent modern woman, and yet it is one that has been ignored in previous scholarship on

McNicoll' s life and work. Travel/tourism at the most simple level is about leaving home, and is an activity which, then as now, is marked by gender, c1ass, and race. What implications did the status of 'woman traveller' carry in a period when respectable femininity was equated with domesticity? 1 would argue that McNicoll's mobility is a challenge to the Victorian ideology of separate spheres and the duties-wifehood, maternity - that accompanied it. It is also a modem stance, not only because tourism increased in popularity and accessibility in this period, but because tourism, as we have seen, is at its root a search for self-identity. Cheryl J. Fish uses the term "mobile subjectivity" to describe "a fluid and provisional epistemology and subject position that is contingent upon one's relationship to specifie persons, incidents, ideologies, locations,

5 Pratt, 6. 6 The most influential examination of the relationship between city and country remains Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973). 96 time, and space. It is a process that enables its agents to examine and create various constructions of the self and others.,,7 This too, is a feminist position: mobile subjects

[0]vercome fixed identities ... literally moving through space and time in consequence of decisions they have made about where and when to go (not that they can control the outcomes), and as they move in a comparative context, they come to understand and posit alternative forms of control and expression even as they face limitations due to geopolitical pressures. This agency, even if incomplete or compromised, reflects a desire for empowerment contingent on the fact of mobility.8

The desire for empowerment through travel and mobility is evident in Helen

McNicoll's few extant letters. In 1913, she writes to her father about her change of address, stating that "she never felt quite independent"9 at her old lodgings. Her longest letter is written on the occasion of being trapped in France upon the outbreak of World

th War 1.10 Dated August 4 , 1914, and written over the course of a week, her long missive details her movements around the French countryside while the government mobilized the troops. She had moved from the provincial town of Longpré to the small village of St.

Valéry-sur-Somme, where she was prevented from leaving for a time. She then travels

home to London by car and boat, discussing the many roadblocks, and her preference for the second-class cabin over the first-class one booked for her by herfather's company.

The tone of the letter is one of breathless anxiety, full of rumours, reports-"sorne

apparently of the wildest nature" -and uncertainty. And yet, there is a pervasive feeling

of excite ment:

7 Cheryl J. Fish, Black and White Women's Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations (Gainesville, FL: University Press ofFlorida, 2004), 6-7. 8 Fish, 7. 9 Helen McNicoII to David McNicoll, 19 March 1913. Artists' Files, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa,ON. JO Helen McNicoII to David McNicoll, 4 August 1914. Artists' Files, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ont. 97

The food here is ever so much better than at Longpré. The people are ail so nice here, and everyone is agreed that this would be one of the safest possible places to come to. Our landlady is so nice and will trust us with anything we want. It would be quite exciting if it were not so sad having aIl the men go. AlI the English here, about a dozen, agree that they would rather be here than anywhere.

Later she writes, "we haven't done any work since Friday, it has been too exciting

... Dollie and 1 don't want to leave unless we really have to." By the end of the letter, safely back in London, she is already planning her next painting trip, this time to the southem coast of Wales. This letter certainly supports the idea that McNicoll was a mobile subject, an independent woman travelling at a time when staying at home was thought to be the most valuable thing a woman could do.

This mobility in McNicoIl's life and evident in her work is the artist's most powerful statement of resistance to the feminine ideals of her time. Fish states, "A mobile body cannot be subjected as easily to the gaze or pinned down in a totalizing identity.,,11

And yet, the perception of Helen McNicoIl as an essentially feminine painter, with an interest in gardens and babies persists. This view of her work is extremely Iimiting: as

Deborah Cherry states, "[e]ven though femininity was often represented as the unitary, homologous polarity of masculinity, femininity in the second half of the nineteenth century was far from being a unitary category or universal condition inhabited by ail women in the same way.,,12 It is only through the careful study of the specifie socio- historical context in which women such as McNicoIllived and worked that we may begin to engage critically with their work.

In the seminal article "Modemity and the Spaces of Femininity," Griselda Pollock states,

11 Fish, 5. 12 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 10. 98

To avoid the embrace of the feminine stereotype which homogenizes women's work as determined by natural gender, we must stress the heterogeneity of women' s art work, the specificity of individual producers and products. Yet we have to recognize what women share-as a result of nurture not nature, Le. the historically variable social systems which produce sexual differentiation. 13

These systems make it insufficient to simply reinstate women like Helen McNicoll back into the canon from which they have been excluded. Rather, we should be working towards an art history that acknowledges the gender, class, and racial biases of its own tradition. It is with these goals in mind-avoiding the embrace of the feminine stereotype, as weil as exposing the prejudices of modemist art history-that 1 have turned to McNicoll' s seldom-discussed paintings of rural sites and sights. Considered within the context of tourism, we may read these images as both potentially feminist and fundamentally modem. Such a reading is not only an attempt at recovering McNicoll' s reputation as an esteemed, independent, professional artist, but also a concerted effort to deconstruct the pervasive and damaging "masculinist myths of modemism. ,,14

13 Griselda Pollock, 'Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," in Vision and Difference: F eminism, Femininity, and the Histories of Art (London and New York: RoutIedge, 1988), 50-90. 55. 14 Pollock, 50. 99

ApPENDIX

The geographic spread of rural artists' colonies at the end of the nineteenth century was extensive, covering regions across Europe and the United States.

GERMANY CBertin RUSSIA

oROlIs_n OWlllingshausen OKleinsassen Giverny Auvers oKronberg o 0 Cemayo 0 Paris Bar1>lzon 0 Chailly AUSTRIA-HUNGARY o oOMartolte Grèz

FRANCE

o VHIag

o Major dIV 'or .-

(Map 1) Artists' Colonies in Europe. In: Lübbren, Nina. Rural Artists' Colonies, 1870- 1910. New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 2001. 100

Abramlsevo. M())CnWO

T.... ldoo·

RUSSIA

• Yaddo

e.MacDowdl

'ewoodstock

• Crl8smoor

Important anlre for .nim Placc of opecial mlCrest This map is intended to show the arriS[ A;;~f~(;\1 colonies and other associated places mentioned in the text. In order to conCentrate on the most important regions, it has been necesSary to omil some far-fl",ng colonies such as Tao! in New Mexico.

(Map 2) Artists' Colonies in Europe and the United States. In: Jacobs, Michael. The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America. Oxford: Phaidon, 1985. 101

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Yakir, Nadira. "Cornubia: Gender, Geography, and Genealogy in St. Ives Modernism." ln Women Artists and Modernism, edited by Katy Deepwell, 112-128. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. (Fig. 1) Helen McNicoll, The Open Door, c. 1913. Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 63.5 cm. Private collection, Toronto. (Fig. 2) Helen McNicoll, Under the Shadow o/the Tent, 1914. Oil on canvas, 83.5 x 101.2 cm. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal. .' ~ ... ~

(Fig. 3) Photograph of Helen McNicoll in her studio, St. Ives, Cornwall, c. 1906. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa. (Fig. 4) Dorothea Sharp, On the Beach, 1914. Oil on board, 35.5 x 44.5 cm. David Messum, London. (Fig. 5) Albrecht Dürer, Artist and Madel: Demonstration of Perspective, 1527. From Dürer's Treatise on Measurement, 20d edition, 1538. Woodcut.

(Fig. 6) Thomas Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, c. 1748. Oil on canvas, 119 x 69 cm. National Gallery, London. (Fig. 7) Helen McNicoll, Gathering Flowers, c. 1912. Oïl on canvas, 76.2 x 63.5 cm. Private collection, Toronto. (Fig. 8) Helen McNicoll, Picking Flowers, c. 1912. Oil on canvas, 94 x 78.8 cm. AGO. Toronto. (Fig. 9) Helen McNicoll, Reaping Time, c. 1909. Oil on canvas, 63 x 76.8 cm. Private collection, Vancouver. (Fig. 10) Helen McNicoll, Tea Time, c. 1911. Oil on canvas, 63 x 52 cm. Private collection, Toronto. (Fig. 11) Helen McNicoll, A Retreat, c. 1911. Oil on canvas, 46 x 41 cm. Private collection, Toronto. (Fig. 12) Helen McNicoll, Sunny Days, c. 1910. Oil on canvas1 64.2 x 77 cm. Private collection, Vancouver. (Fig. 13) Helen McNicoll, On the Beach, c. 1912. Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76.2 cm. Private collection. (Fig. 14) Helen McNicoll, On the Cliffs, c. 1913. Oil on canvas, 50.9 x 61 cm. Private collection, Toronto. (Fig. 15) Helen McNicoll, Sunny September, 1913. Oil on canvas, 92 x 107.5 cm. Private collection, Fonthill. (Fig. 16) Claude Monet, Cliffs al Varengville, 1882. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm. Lefevre Gallery, London. (Fig. 17) Laura Knight, Two Girls on a Cliff, c. 1917. Oil on canvas, 60 x 72.5 cm. Sotheby's. (Fig. 18) Marianne Preindlsberger-Stokes, The Passing Train, c. 1890. Oil on canvas, 61 x 76.2 cm. Private collection. (Fig. 19) Helen McNicoll, The Apple Gatherer, c. 1911. Oil on canvas, 106.8 x 92.2 cm. Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton. (Fig. 20) Helen McNicoll, The Little Worker, c. 1907. ail on canvas, 61 x 51.3 cm. AGa, Toronto. (Fig. 21) Helen McNicoll, The Gleaner, c. 1908. Oil on canvas, 76.3 x 63.8 cm. Private collection, Toronto. (Figs. 22 and 23) Helen McNicoll, Photographs of Dorothea Sharp and model, c. 1908. (Fig. 24) Paul Gauguin, The Vision Afrer the Sermon, 1888. Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm. Art Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. (Fig. 25) George Elgar Hicks, The Sinews ofOld England, 1857. Watercolour on paper, 76 x 53.5 cm. Private coIlection. (Fig. 26) Jules Bastien Lepage, Les Foins, 1878. Oil on canvas, 180 x 195 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Fig. 27) Camille Pissarro, Apple Picking at Eragny, t 888. Oil on canvas, 59 x 72 cm. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas. (Fig. 28) Adolphe-William Bouguereau, The Broken Pitcher, 189 I. Oil on canvas, 135 x 84 cm. The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco. '-"', :.::,,'l ~?'t'~'-:-'. r",~:,~,:,··';·'~7,,:Z:'''f't%:·.''''~.7·: ,' ..'; .... ,,-,"~-.I.":"~~.~~" ~~~ , ;. "j,;;";,,~;p;~~

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(Fig. 29) Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857. Oil on canvas, 83.7 x 111 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. (Fig. 30) Open page of Helen McNicoll's scrapbook, c. 1900. Private collection, Acton. (Fig. 31) Helen McNicoll, A Welcome Breeze, c. 1909. Oil on canvas, 51.3 x 61.8 cm. Private collection, Acton. (Fig. 32) Helen McNicol1. The Fruit Vendor, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 61.6 x 51.4 Cill. Location unknown. (Fig. 33) Paul Gauguin, WO!J/(1Il Holding ([ Fruit (Where Are YOII (;Oill,f(' J, 1K93. Oil O/l can\'as, 92 x 73 CIll. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.