Family of the artist
Masters Gallery, Calgary
Private Collection, Calgary
Literature
A.K. Prakash, “Canadian Art: Selected Masters from Private Collections”, Ottawa, 2003, page 181
A Montreal native who studied in Paris, Randolph Hewton was a pioneer of modernism in Canadian painting of the early twentieth century. “Girl in the Garden” demonstrates Hewton’s modernist take on the traditional practice of portraiture. Hewton’s use of vibrant colours were at first controversial in Canada, as he had adopted this palette from the European Avant-Garde while in Paris from 1908 to 1913. The subject of portraiture in his work was a departure from the norm of the landscape painting of many of his colleagues, and in Hewton, the next generation of portrait painters - Heward, Mabel May and Lilias Torrance Newton - found a source of inspiration. A.K. Prakash describes Hewton’s innovative and vibrant portraits, such as “Girl in the Garden”, as “a visual whisper of colour and line”.
According to a gallery label on the reverse, the sitter in this work is Betty Patrick, the daughter of a mill worker who was employed by the artist.
