Sumachs - Study for Background of "Dark Girl"

Continental Galleries, Montreal Sotheby's, auction, Toronto, 13 May 1975, lot 199 as "Sumach" Private Collection, Toronto

"Expressions of Will", Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen's University, Kingston; travelling to Concordia University Art Gallery, Montreal; McMichael Canadian Collection, Kleinburg; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, 1 March 1986-15 February 1987, no. 28

Natalie Luckyj, "Expressions of Will", Kleinburg, 1986, no. 28 Julia Skelly, "Prudence Heward Life & Work" [online publication], Art Canada Institute, Toronto, 2015, pages 41, 49

An affiliate of the Beaver Hall Group, the Canadian Group of Painters, and the Contemporary Arts Society, Prudence Heward was a crucial artist of her time, renowned for her portraits of female subjects in a variety of settings, from rural and public spaces to domestic interiors.  Portrayals of black women feature prominently in the artist’s oeuvre. As the title indicates, this oil on panel is the landscape study for Heward’s 1935 painting, "Dark Girl," depicting a seated nude black woman surrounded by lush foliage. “We do not know for certain Heward’s motivations for choosing to paint black women,” Julia Skelly writes, “but her decision to produce several paintings of them indicates that she had a particular interest in the black female subject.” Heward had painted her first depiction of a black woman with "Dark Girl", which was exhibited locally at the Canadian Group of Painters show in 1936 and internationally in the Century of Canadian Art exhibition in London in 1938. Most recently, the artwork was included amongst a selection of eight works by the artist in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection’s exhibition "Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment" in 2021. Although predominantly known for her figure paintings, Heward produced many landscapes and still lifes throughout her career. The artist often painted "en plein air" and would occasionally develop these landscape studies to serve as the background in her figure paintings, as exemplified in Dark Girl which incorporates the artist’s study of the sumach plant in vibrant shades of red, yellow and green. As Julia Skelly observes, “Heward’s landscapes and still lifes of the 1930s and 1940s, like her portraits, are characterized by increasingly luminous colours and more expressive brushwork, showing her increased comfort with finding an individual style and subjective interpretation of nature.”