PROVENANCE
Kastel Gallery Inc., Montreal
Mayberry Fine Art, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Barbara Meadowcroft, Anne Savage (1896 – 1971), Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, 1992, pages 9 – 12
Heffel Fine Art Auction House, Fine Canadian and Irish Art, November 27, 2003, the related canvas titled La Paysanne reproduced page 89
Groupe Beaver Hall, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, 2007, the related canvas titled La Paysanne reproduced page 33

A native of Montreal, Anne Savage studied with William Brymner and Maurice Cullen at the Art Association of Montreal and in 1922 began teaching at Baron Byng High School, where she became renowned for her innovative program. She began exhibiting in 1917 and was an original member of the Beaver Hall Group in 1921 and of the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933.

Savage was principally a landscape painter, though figures play a narrative role in her early decorative paintings and appear as staffage in the occasional urban view. In 1927, she sketched portraits of Indigenous women with babies on the Skeena River and painted a few portraits of family members. But her favoured subjects were the landscapes around the family summer home at Wonish in the Laurentians and at Métis, Quebec. Only in The Strawberry Pickers, Cap à l’Aigle are figures the dominant elements in the composition.

This study of a farm woman is a unique figurative painting by Savage and provides a fascinating insight into the artist’s painting procedure. The study is painted on Masonite, a support the artist began to use after her retirement from Baron Byng in 1948, though the more finished treatment of the figure suggests an earlier date. The farm woman rests by the field, a tree stump to her left, her rake held strongly in her hands. The principal elements of the composition are all defined but the sketch remains unfinished, as evident in the absence of facial features. In fact, this is a preliminary study of another, almost identical, signed oil, painted on a panel of the same dimensions, which was sold by Heffel in 2003 and was subsequently included in a Beaver Hall Group exhibition at Galerie Walter Klinkhoff in Montreal in 2007. In this latter work, the facial features are painted in, the arms more broadly brushed, and the rows in the ploughed field at right more defined. Yet all the elements, including the folds of the dress and apron bib are determined in this fresh, plein air oil study of a rural worker.

We thank Charles C. Hill, former curator of Canadian art from 1980 to 2014 at the National Gallery of Canada and author of The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, for contributing the above essay.

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