Art canadien classique
Spring Magog, 1946
40.6 x 45.7 cm
Inscriptions
signed and dated, ‘N Collyer/ 1946’ (lower left); signed, titled and dated, ‘Nora F.E. Collyer /Spring Magog 1946’ (verso, upper centre); unfinished sketch of a house (verso, centre)Provenance
Private collection, Knowlton
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
Property of a Distinguished Montreal Collector, 2006
Private collection, Montreal
Expositions
Montreal, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Beaver Hall Group: Fundraising Exhibition on behalf of the Auxiliary of the Montreal Chest Institute and the BMP Foundation, 25-28 April 2007, cat. no. 79.
Montreal, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Important Canadian Art, 12 May 2007, cat. no. 8.
Nora Collyer’s most celebrated subjects are the farms, orchards and fields of the eastern Townships, near Foster/Brome, Quebec where first her family had a property, then later from Strawberry Hill in nearby Magog. This is a particularly fine composition of a sweeping landscape of the Magog area, over Lake Memphremagog toward the distant mountains. Rich and bold in colour she was one of the pioneering women active painting in terms of a modern palette, a member of the Beaver Hall Group of artists.
She is characteristic of the circumstance of many Beaver Hall women who had to juggle the responsibilities of looking after family members while making a living with her art and teaching art as a career.
Reviewing Nora Collyer’s solo exhibition at our original family art gallery, Walter Klinkhoff Gallery in 1964, the distinguished art critic for the Montreal Star, Robert Ayre wrote: “she loves ripeness, the fatness of the land, the snugness of the villages in the hills, and celebrates them in full bodied colour and easy, comfortable rhythms.” [1]
A student of Maurice Cullen and William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal, Nora Collyer was the youngest member of the Beaver Hall Group. Collyer moved into the now-famous building located at 305 Beaver Hall Hill in 1921, and for three years shared a studio there with Anne Savage. She began exhibiting with the Royal Canadian Academy (R.C.A.) as early as 1922. From 1925 to 1930, she was a teacher at Trafalgar School, a private all girl school, located just a block from Galerie Alan Klinkhoff, Montreal. She retired from “Traf” after 5 years, following the death of her mother, in order to manage the household for her father and brother. Her paintings were included in several exhibitions of the Canadian Group of Painters and one of her works was included in the exhibition of Canadian paintings in the Canadian Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. She continued to teach, first at the Art Association of Montreal (the art school at the originally named Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) and then gave private lessons from her home on Elm in Westmount.
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Footnote:
[1] Barbara Meadowcroft, Painting Friends: The Beaver Hall Women Painters (Québec: Vehicule Press, 1999), 127.
