Beaver Hall Hill Group

Helen C
2 days ago
2 min read

I was introduced to the Group of 7 Canadian Painters 6 years ago when I was taking night painting classes in Boston. Their work truly resonated with me and my love for the upstate NY region. The Group of 7 was comprised of all male painters. In the last few years, I've made efforts to look at more female painters and I discovered a group that was aligned with these male Canadian painters, but were women. Their group was called the Beaver Hall Hill Group.

The Beaver Hall Hill Group was a Montreal-based collective of Canadian modernists whose work combined bold color, personal expression, and modern design with intimate observations of people, urban life, and the Canadian landscape. Distinguished by its strong contingent of women artists, the group offered an alternative to the wilderness-focused nationalism of the Group of Seven and helped define a more diverse vision of Canadian modernism.

What makes the group especially important is that it was one of the first major Canadian art associations in which women played a central role. Artists such as Anne Savage, Prudence Heward, Sarah Robertson, Nora Collyer, and Kathleen Morris helped shape a distinctly Montreal version of modernism.

I watched this video about their group which tickled me, learning about their lives as a group of women, painting during the early 20th century. Their travels, relationships, gatherings, different paint approaches...

They often wrote in journals which the video includes. Hearing their journal entries gave even more insight to their voices, day to day schedules, opinions, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiOFmwaZTRk

Anne Savage's work