Sumachs - Study for Background of "Dark Girl" by Efa Prudence Heward

Born in Montreal. Quebec, she became interested in art early in her life. She attended classes at the Art Association of Montreal under William Brymner with fellow students, Edwin Holgate, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton and Emily Coonan. Miss Heward also worked for two summers under Maurice Cullen, sketching at Phillipsburg and Carillon. During the First World War, she and her mother worked with the Red Cross in London, England (her brothers also served overseas with the army). Following the war she continued her studies in Montreal under Randolph Hewton who, as A.Y. Jackson related, “...did much to increase her interest in understanding of the modern school.” She then studied in Paris at the Academie Colarossi and returned to Montreal where in 1920 she joined a group of artists who had secured rooms on Beaver Hall Hill.

Norah McCullough explains this activity of the group as follows, “The idea was to maintain club rooms for other artists where they might meet and hold exhibitions. A small room downstairs served this purpose while back rooms and those upstairs became studios for a succession of artists. All those associated with the Beaver Hall Hill Group had been William Brymner's students at the School of Fine Art Association of Montreal, that is to say, very well trained indeed by the brilliant teacher.” The Group included Nora Collyer, Emily Coonan, Mabel Lockerby, H. Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrence Newton, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage and Ethel Seath. Prudence Heward specialized mainly in the field of figure and portrait painting. After a few years, the Group dissolved because it proves impracticable financially, but all of the artists went on alone to develop into painters of distinction. Miss Heward won first prize for her “Girl on a Hill” at the Willingdon Arts Competition in 1929. This was a study of Louise McLea, a Montreal dancer.

Most of her painting was done at the Heward house on Peel street in Montreal whee her young nieces posed for many of her studies. In the late summer of each year Prudence Heward would go sketching with Sarah Robertson, A.Y. Jackson, the Heward family and others at the Heward's summer home near Brockville, Ontario, on the St. Lawrence. She was a great admirer of the work of Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, Derian, Picasso, Modigliani and Francis Hodgkins. She owned two of Hodgkins' canvases, and her work reflected the influences of all of these artists.

In 1930, her three-quarter length portrait “Rollande” attracted much attention at the Fifth annual exhibition of Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada and was acquired by the Gallery in the same year.

In 1932 an exhibition of her work was held at the galleries of W.W. Scott and Sons, Drummond Street, Montreal. The showing included her portraits, landscapes, and plant studies. “The Gazette” noted the following, “The exhibition, which contains both portraits and landscapes, is marked by brilliant colour, strong modelling and interesting rhythmic composition. Miss Heward in her portraits never allows the setting to become just the background, but it is always an integral part of the picture. As a result, her canvases are pervaded with unity of form, feeling, colour and these.” The same year her “Three Sisters” and “Nude under a Tree” were reproduced in the “Bridle and Golfer.” The “Nude under a Tree” was considered to be one of the finest nudes in Canada at that time, although it was also a controversial work.

She exhibited at W.W. Scott and Sons in 1934 with Sarah Robertson and Isobel McLaughlin where their work was well received. Arthur Lismer in “The Montreal Star” noted, “Her landscapes avoid anything in the way of pretty textures or pictorial detail. They are concerned more with the structure and movement of the earth and forms, rather than with representations of the likeness of the scene.”

She became a member of the Canadian Group of Painters (1933) and the Contemporary Arts Society (1939); she travelled to Bermuda where she sketched with Isabel McLaughlin, also with her at Saint-Sauveur, Quebec, and Whitefish near Manitoulin Island. There she produced studies of Indigenous Peoples. Failing health caused her to move to Los Angeles, California, where she passed away in 1947.

A memorial exhibition of 101 of her works was organized and presented by The National Gallery of Canada in 1948. After being shown at the Gallery in Ottawa, it went on tour to public galleries throughout Canada. H.O. McCurry (then Director of the NGC) in the foreword of the catalogue wrote, “Prudence Heward was a figure painter of unusual distinction at a time when the emphasis among Canadian artists was almost exclusively on landscape. At the National Gallery she is held in high esteem not only for what she accomplished, but also for the regard in which she has always been held by her fellow artists, among them A.Y. Jackson who has written the introduction to this catalogue.”

Her works are part of the collections of the Art Association of Montreal; The Art Gallery of Ontario; Hart House, University of Toronto; The National Gallery of Canda which received 22 of her paintings after her death as a gift from her mother Mrs. A.R.G. Heward. The Continental Galleries, Montreal, held an exhibition of her paintings in the autumn of 1964.

Source: "A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume I: A-F", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1977