Helen McNicoll: In search of Light
Helen McNicoll, Stubble Fields (detail), c.1912, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 89.7 cm. Purchased 1912. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC
The conspicuous absence of scholarly attention to the unique contributions of Canadian women artists to the evolution of modernity in 19th- and 20th-century art has only recently begun to be rectified. Historically, these artists have been presented as amateur and "feminine," but there is a lot more to their works, which were considered "gendered" by art critics at the time. This article marks the particular achievements of Helen Galloway McNicoll, one of Canada’s most accomplished Impressionist painters at the turn of the 20th century.
Although McNicoll’s contribution to the history of the visual arts in Canada was the subject of two major exhibitions at either end of the 20th century – the 1925 memorial exhibition of some 150 works at the Art Association of Montreal and the 1999 comprehensive retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario – her ground-breaking vision of painting light-filled landscapes, fields and gardens has not been given the attention it deserves.
Robert Harris, Helen McNicoll, 1910, oil on canvas, 77.3 x 61.5 cm. Gift of Vivian and David Campbell, Toronto, 1981. 81/222. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Photo: © AGO
Toronto-born McNicoll was raised in a wealthy family in Montreal, where she began her art studies at the School of the Art Association of Montreal with William Brymner, who was among the first wave of Canadian artists to study and work abroad. She subsequently moved to England to further her studies, which included a stay at the artist colony at St. Ives. For the last decade of her short career, she divided her time between France and England, where she maintained a studio in London. Exhibiting actively both at home and abroad, she died in England at the age of 35.
Recognized by her contemporaries as one of Canada’s leading advocates of the Impressionist style, McNicoll discovered Impressionism early on in her practice, most likely influenced by Brymner. She adopted a palette of vibrant colours, combined with loose and fluid brushwork that infused her scenes with a shimmering quality of air and light. She painted with speed and spontaneity, capturing the atmospheric effect of time of day. The most innovative element in her landscape painting was colour temperature. McNicoll understood that colour, as perceived by the eye, is a composite of hue and chroma, and thus modulated the warmness and coldness of colour to evoke light falling on her subject.
Helen McNicoll, Stubble Fields, c.1912, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 89.7 cm. Purchased 1912. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC
It was likely that this exceptional sensitivity to the portrayal of light that in 1912 caught the attention of Eric Brown, founding director of the National Gallery of Canada, when he saw McNicoll's painting Stubble Fields at the Art Association of Montreal Spring Exhibition. Brown wrote a persuasive letter to the young and aspiring artist, whose painting he had greatly admired: “I should be very glad to hear from you whether you would send your picture Stubble Fields up here for consideration for purchase for the National Gallery. … The picture which I liked very much was hanging in the old gallery rather high up and was a cornfield full of sunshine with some distant trees and hills.”
Known to be a harsh critic, Brown's selection of her painting as the only one from that exhibition was a great acknowledgement of her talent. He also informed Edmund Walker, the chair of the Gallery's art advisory committee, that he hoped to acquire only two works that year – one by Lawren S. Harris from a recent submission to the Ontario Society of Artists exhibition in Toronto and the one by Helen McNicoll. An exhibition review in the Montreal Daily Star noted that her painting was “especially worthy of admiration.” Curiously, Stubble Fields is one of only two paintings acquired by a public institution during the artist’s lifetime. Its acquisition is an important part of the early history of the national collection and Brown's championing of art by Canadian women artists.
McNicoll’s choices of subject matter are equally intriguing. Today known primarily for her figure studies and her depictions of women and children, in her lifetime she was also recognized as a landscape painter, with critics frequently praising her talent in distilling light across landscape. Painting in the French countryside and elsewhere in Europe – like many first-generation Canadian Impressionists, including her Montreal art teachers Brymner and Maurice Cullen – was part of her training in capturing the fleeting effect of light. Like them, she was attracted to the simple motifs of quiet country life and picturesque rural pastures and dwellings, which included the daily lives and seasonal labours of their inhabitants.
Striking in its use of iridescent colours, Stubble Fields appears to subtly dissolve the solid shapes of the haystacks into an atmospheric veil of light. The cornfield extends far into the picture plane, a sea of coloured reflections of sunlight, composed of rich shades of yellow, orange and purple. The densely built-up surface of the two haystacks contrasts with the more thinly painted hills in the distance. The landscape unfolds under a blue sky of extraordinary purity.
W.H. Clapp, Chézy, Valley of the Marne, 1908, oil on canvas, 67.9 x 89.5 cm. Private collection, Montreal. Photo: Courtesy Alan Klinkhoff Gallery
The composition can be seen as an homage to Claude Monet and his series of haystack paintings. It conveys a sense of rural tranquility, evocative of the French master’s reverie in the beauty of nature. Echoing Monet's interest in “instantaneity” and exploration of light cascading across the field of vision, McNicoll invites the viewer to feel the brilliance of a late summer's day and evokes the oppressive heat of the harvest season through the hot colour temperature of yellow. Her expert handling of light and shade enabled McNicoll to integrate an element of spontaneity into the process of painting. W.H. Clapp, McNicoll’s classmate from Montreal, also painted a similar moment of the summer harvest at midday, at Chézy in France, around the same time. The two artists were initially on a similar trajectory in art, having shared the prestigious Jessie Dow award in 1908, before Clapp moved on to the subject of the nude in the landscape and evolved in his technical approach to painting.
Following her first sojourn in France around 1908, McNicoll’s relationship with light evolved still further during the early 1910s. While living at the St. Ives art colony, she studied with British painter Algernon Talmage, who taught his students to paint from direct observation out of doors. It was here that McNicoll met Dorothea Sharp (1874–1955), who would become her travel and painting companion until her untimely death in 1915. Sharp was instrumental in hiring models and caring for the artists' day-to-day needs and accommodations. These were usually challenging for McNicoll, who had lost her hearing in early childhood.
Unknown photographer, Helen McNicoll in studio, c.1906, 24.3 x 13.9 cm. and Dorothea Sharp, Helen McNicoll adjusting model’s hair, n.d. , 24.3 x 19 cm. Both The Robert McLaughlin Gallery Archives. Courtesy of the The Robert McLaughlin Gallery Archives
At St. Ives she was tenacious and hard-working, determined to advance her skills in painting en plein air. In a photograph taken around 1906, a confident McNicoll is standing at the easel in her studio. It was during this period that she began to frame her compositions from different viewpoints and to crop images as in a snapshot, capturing her subjects unposed, with natural and relaxed gestures. McNicoll's treatment of light is integral to her relationship with time, colour, reflection and movement in the natural world. Whether in open spaces, enclosed gardens, by the sea or in the marketplace, her preoccupation is with light and the role it plays as the ultimate instrument of painting.
Helen McNicoll, Buttercups, c. 1910, oil on canvas, 40.7 x 46.1 cm. Bequest of Sylva Gelber, Ottawa, 2005. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC
McNicoll's painting Buttercups, acquired by the Gallery in 2005, exemplifies her interest in the fleeting effects of light. The composition is enclosed and intimate. A sense of calm permeates the scene. The two children are not interacting with each other, nor connecting to the viewer. The sense of a fleeting moment is subtly implied, as a carriage in the distance awaits to take them home. The act of picking flowers evokes the transient beauty of the blossom season, a metaphor for the ever-changing landscape. Here too, the underlined subject is the dazzling sunlight that reflects off the soft greens of grass and foliage. The foreground is painted in short, rapid brushstrokes, suggestive of the grass rustling in the wind.
Helen McNicoll, The Farmyard, c.1908, oil on canvas, 71 x 85.5 cm. Saint John Art Club Collection, 1995, 1995.26.26. New Brunswick Museum / www.nbm-mnb.ca
A vanguard figure, McNicoll became a celebrated female painter of the second-generation Canadian Impressionists. It is important to highlight her lone voice in Canadian art – indeed in North American art – breaking ground as a female painter. By placing her in an international context, one sees the compelling similarities as well as the differences in relation to her contemporaries. Her treatment of light as a subject is a painterly aesthetic that she shares with the leading Impressionists of the period. McNicoll’s depiction of the passing moments is less transient, however. A sense of permanence and stability underpins her compositions, even when portraying instantaneous gestures, such as picking flowers.
As a female painter who relocated from North America to Europe, McNicoll shares the challenge of being placed in the same category as the great American painter Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). In contrast to McNicoll, Cassatt’s paintings centre around the theme of bonding, intimacy and care, primarily in the relationship between mother and child. She portrays them in interiors or protected outdoor spaces – areas associated with women in this period. Although Cassatt understands the effect of light, she does not focus on light itself. McNicoll, however, paints light as a primary subject, and rarely deals with the themes of intimacy and bonding. Unlike Cassatt, she is equally skilled at painting landscape and figures, prefering to make landscape the main theme rather than a backdrop.
McNicoll’s painting Stubble Fields is on display in Room A106 in the Indigenous and Canadian Galleries at the National Gallery of Canada; Buttercups will be on loan to the exhibition Cassatt–McNicoll: Impressionists Between Worlds at the Art Gallery of Ontario, from May 31 to September 4, 2023. Share this article and subscribe to our newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest articles, Gallery exhibitions, news and events, and to learn more about art in Canada.
