Barbara, Daughter of F. Pitcher Esq.

Private Collection, Ontario

Art Association of Montreal, Thirty-Ninth Spring Exhibition, 1922

Barbara Ann Pitcher (1910-1929), daughter of the prominent Pitcher family of Montreal, and student at McGill University, tragically went missing in 1929 at the age of 19. Her body was found two months later, and her death attributed to suicide. Barbara would have been 12 years of age when this portrait was painted. Barbara’s mother was Harriet Brooks Pitcher, the first Canadian female nuclear physicist, who was involved in research on nuclear transmutations and radioactivity. Harriet worked with Marie Curie in France, and sadly had to give up her academic career when she married Frank Pitcher, a professor of physics at McGill University.