Summer Landscape by Ethel Seath

Provenance:
Acquired directly from the artist
By descent to the current Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:
Evelyn Walters, “The Women of Beaver Hall: Canadian Modernist Painters,” Toronto, 2005, page 117

Ethel Seath worked as an illustrator and later an art teacher in Montreal; in her spare time she took sketching classes and trips with William Brymner, Edmond Dyonnet and Maurice Cullen with the Art Association of Montreal. A member of the Beaver Hall Group, she took trips to lower Saint Lawrence region, the Eastern Townships and Nova Scotia with fellow members Nora Collyer and Sarah Robertson, which inspired her landscapes and harbour scenes. Seath was distinctly a modernist. A Montreal Star exhibition review remarked that “Seath’s first concern is with colour and design. She gets them both from the earth and the fruits of the earth... But while she clings to the things she knows and loves, she has a strong sense of their abstract qualities.” “Summer Landscape” demonstrates her reductive approach to a scene of rural Quebec, in its flattened perspective and her simplified trees in bold greens which reveal the bare canvas underneath.