Darrell Morrisey
(1897 - 1930)

In January 1921, Darrell Morrisey presented a portrait at the first annual exhibition of the Beaver Hall Group. Although few of the artist’s works are known, the titles she gave to those she exhibited up to 1920 indicate an interest in the portraits and rural landscapes while those of the following decades mainly evoke her travels in Europe.

A pupil at the school of the Art Association of Montreal (AAM) from 1917 to 1920, Morrisey participated in several of the institutions Spring Exhibitions (1916-21, 1923, 1924 and 1928) and four times at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (1922, 1923, 1925 and 1927). In June 1917, with a group of other pupils including Regina Seiden and Anne Savage, she took open-air drawing classes from Maurice Cullen in Phillipsburg, Quebec. The following year, she took the same classes from William Brymner in Calumet (now Pointe-Calumet) Quebec. During the 1920s, her name frequently appears in the Montreal papers, as her work was admired by the English-speaking critics. From August 1921 to July 1922, she travelled in Europe, visiting the United Kingdom, Italy and France. She occasionally visited the United States (1926,1928,1930).

Source: Jacques des Rochers and Brian Foss, “1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group”, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2015