Buttercups

It was at St. Ives, Cornwall, that the Montreal painter Helen McNicoll learned to paint outdoors from direct observation. There, she met her painting companion, Dorothea Sharpe. Together they painted intimate scenes of women and children bathed in light. While the foreground field is painted with short, rapid brush strokes, a sense of comfortable silence permeates the scene. The children acknowledge neither the viewer nor each other.