Description |
Canadian BHHG, CGP, RCA [1893-1986]
BACK FROM THE WELL
oil on panel
12 x 14 in. (30.5 x 35.6 cm)
signed
Provenance: Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal, QC; Masters Gallery, Calgary, AB
Kathleen Moir Morris was an active member of the lively Quebec art community in the 1920s and ‘30s. While she received critical acclaim during her career, there was a time in recent history when she, and many other important Canadian women painters, languished almost forgotten. Morris, an early modernist, is known for her intimate, gentle scenes of Quebec and eastern Ontario, often depicting small towns, churches, markets, horse-drawn sleighs, vignettes of everyday life. Particularly prized are her timeless winter scenes, where the light and shadow of the snow interplays with rich contrasting colours to create brilliant canvases.
Kathleen Morris was born the youngest of four children, and only daughter, of Eliza Howard Bell and Montague John Morris. She was born with a disorder of the nervous system that affected her speech and motor skills. When young Kathleen showed a passion for drawing, her mother arranged for piano lessons to help improve her coordination, and then actively encouraged her to paint. Morris always maintained a positive spirit and joy for life. In a 1976 interview with the Montreal Gazette, Morris recalls "I had a wonderful mother, she would take me off on sketching trips and sit beside me while I painted. But on cold days I would go alone. I couldn’t walk miles, so I would be taken out to paint in a sleigh where I would be dropped off. The snow was so deep that the only place I could paint was in the tracks of the sleigh... But do you know, I was never cold. It was so beautiful."
Morris pursued her formal studies at the Art Association of Montreal (The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) under the well-known Canadian artists Maurice Cullen and William Brymner. Art in Canada was historically a man's domain. Even during the 1920s, when the Group of Seven was revolutionizing the image of art in Canada, group membership remained male. It was in that era, in 1920, that Morris joined a group of women artists at a studio building located at 305 Beaver Hall Hill in Montreal. Here, the 10 female group members worked alongside their male colleagues, supported each other during their rise to prominence, and remained lifelong friends and associates. These women participated in a number of exhibitions as a group, and also exhibited with the Group of Seven, in Canada and internationally. Morris, became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1929, and the Canadian Group of Painters in 1940. While she exhibited in many group and association shows, Morris had only one solo exhibition during her artistic career (1939).
Although largely overlooked by art historians and not well known by the public, Kathleen Morris' work, and that of the other members of the Beaver Hall Hill Group, is the subject of renewed discovery, and is finally beginning to achieve due recognition in the history of Canadian Art.
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