Lot 179: Nora Frances Elizabeth Collyer 1898 - 1979 Canadian double-sided oil on board Snow Removal, Dorchester Street, Montreal / Eastern Landscape (verso)

Nora Frances Elizabeth Collyer 1898 - 1979 Canadian double-sided oil on board Snow Removal, Dorchester Street, Montreal / Eastern Landscape (verso)
11 3/4 x 14 inches 29.8 x 35.6 centimeters signed and on verso signed and titled on the gallery label Literature:Paul Duval, Four Decades, The Canadian Group of Painters and Their Contemporaries - 1930 - 1970, 1972, page 41
Provenance:Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
Private Collection, British Columbia Nora Collyer was part of the Beaver Hall Group which was formed in 1920. The Beaver Hall studio functioned as an art club - a place to meet and exchange ideas - and when they left two years later, the women members stayed connected as part of a network, exhibiting together and supporting each other. Art historian Paul Duval felt that the Beaver Hall Group "provided a strong impetus to the careers of many of the finest women painters Canada has so far produced."
Collyer's family were members of Montreal's English Protestant elite, and the Beaver Hall women would often paint at the Collyer family farm at Foster. Collyer lived in Westmount, teaching art and painting, and spent her summers at Strawberry Hill, a cottage she built near Foster.
This bold atmospheric scene of working men and horse-drawn sleighs is reminiscent of fellow Beaver Hall artist Kathleen Morris's scenes of Montreal cabstands. Pared down to its essential elements of form, this oil sketch, with its pigment-loaded brush-strokes, interesting aerial perspective and contrasts between bright snow highlighted with creamy pastels against rich reds and blues, radiates vitality, giving this street scene great visual impact.