This intimate composition by Nora Collyer, presents a view from within, looking outward onto a richly coloured autumn landscape. A potted bouquet placed on the windowsill anchors the foreground acting as a quiet mediator between interior and exterior space. Beyond, trees, fences, and fields are painted with interlocking bands of colour, their forms animated by Collyer’s lively brushwork.Her palette of vivid greens, ochres, and rusts highlighted with blues and violets stimulates a sensation. 

The work exemplifies a central concern of the Beaver Hall artists, a realm where the domestic interior and the landscape beyond are intimately connected. This “inside/outside” perspective makes for an animated topic of discussion among academics studying women artists including the Beaver Hall Group women. 

The composition of the artist indoors looking out is not uncommon for the ladies of the Beaver Hall group. There is a reasonable interpretation that this is representative of the fate or state of the women of this generation, their painting place is within that domestic environment, the house or just outside, occasionally in an urban setting just beyond one’s doorway and at other times in the country, at a family country house. At the same time, the gentlemen artists, their peers, Maurice Cullen, Robert Pilot , Albert Robinson, A. Y. Jackson and others were out in the landscape painting. In Collyer’s case, a significant body of her painting in the country is located at either her parents’ property or later her own in the Magog area of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. 

In 1921, Nora Collyer moved into the now-famous building located at 305 Beaver Hall Hill, where for three years shared a studio with Anne Savage. She had been a student of William Brymner and Maurice Cullen at the Art Association of Montreal where she won two bursaries for her artwork. There, at the Art Association of Montreal, she began exhibiting in their annual exhibitions as early as 1919 and for the next 35 years. With the Royal Canadian Academy (R.C.A.), she exhibited from 1922 continuing until 1942. For five years she taught at Trafalgar School, a private girl's school in Montreal. She continued teaching at the Art Association of Montreal, Saturday morning classes to children with Sarah Robertson (see Jacques Des Rochers and Brian Foss, et al., 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group, (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2015, 294) and in later years gave private lessons from her home. Her paintings were included in several exhibitions of the Canadian Group of Painters. One of her paintings was included in the exhibition of Canadian paintings in the Canadian Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. In 1964, our original family art gallery, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, hosted a solo selling exhibition for Nora Collyer.