Lot 117: Laura Adelaine Lyall Muntz 1860 - 1930 Canadian

Laura Adelaine Lyall Muntz 1860 - 1930 Canadian oil on canvas Reflections of Beauty 35 x 27 1/2 inches 88.9 x 69.8 centimeters on verso titled and inscribed ""by Laura Muntz OSA"" Literature:Letter from Elizabeth Muntz to Marie Douglas, April 9, 1964, Private Collection Provenance:Private Collection, Toronto The title of Laura Muntz's painting, Reflections of Beauty, has an elegiac ring to it, signaling that Muntz was sorting through memories as she created the work. The model, if we can apply the term to the young woman holding the mirror, was her niece, Elizabeth Muntz (1894 - 1977), later a sculptor in England. Elizabeth was one of Laura's favourite subjects, and she used her features often in her work, depicting Elizabeth in various poses (many imagined) and changing the position of her body, hair style, hair colour and garments to her liking. As Elizabeth wrote later to a friend, she posed "after a fashion". She wrote, "I say 'after a fashion' because so often she [Laura Muntz] would show me a picture and say, 'You didn't know I was painting you that day? I painted you in my head and put it out of my head onto the canvas after you had gone.'" In the course of making the painting, Muntz provided the viewer with a fascinating example of her appetite for contemporary developments. She had long been an admirer of Mary Cassatt, and in her own work had drawn on some of Cassatt's ideas of portraying children and women. In 1909, Cassatt had painted Woman at Her Toilette, a depiction of a seated young woman looking in a hand mirror, a popular subject of the day. Elsewhere, Cassatt had depicted women in close proximity to each other, as in A Corner of the Loge, 1879. Possibly, in Reflections of Beauty, Muntz was making an interesting point about the mutability of beauty - and relying on an audience who would have known and appreciated Cassatt's work. Muntz had a tendency to cherry-pick information while painting. While she drew upon her knowledge of her beautiful young niece for the face and body of the young woman looking in the mirror, she failed to finish some parts of the rest of the picture. For example, she lightly skimmed over the hand holding the fan and the figure in the background. At the same time she seriously venerated beauty, and loved to depict young women in gorgeous attire, from their hats to their dresses. The subject heralded quite a new world for her, one in which she would attempt different subjects and paint them with the same force that her work exhibited over the decade and a half she had been painting. These works sometimes transcended what had always been her mainstay - her juvenile genre - partly through their assertion of the power and interest of grown-up women, partly through their rich, muted colours and dense, painterly handling. Through the strength of subjects such as these, Muntz's paintings withstood the competition within her milieu and added to the respect in which she was held - hence, her inclusion in The Art Gallery of Toronto's 1926 Exhibition of Canadian Paintings along with works by Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald and Tom Thomson, among others. We thank Joan Murray for contributing the above essay.