I went to the members and media preview of the Mary Cassatt & Helen McNicoll exhibition at the AGO yesterday and returned home in a cloud of gentle floral and hay breezes of the fields of Provence. It’s the atmosphere that you get with this showcase of mostly McNicoll (1879 Toronto - 1915 Swanage, UK) with a few key Cassatts in between: the older American impressionist (1844-1926) was a celebrity in McNicoll’s time and certainly an influence. As were European impressionists for both artists.
Both women came from well-off families, both travelled to Europe and moved there as soon as they could. McNicoll contracted scarlet fever as a toddler and lost her hearing, which probably freed her from the obligation of matrimony and further opened up the path towards a career in arts. It’s the era of Henry James and Edith Wharton heroines, with North Americans touring (and getting stuck) in Europe which always somehow becomes a story of the innocence lost. It’s the golden Edwardian decades that these paintings emanate so well; it’s the time before the twentieth century began in earnest with the Great War.
I found McNicoll more interesting, somehow - but that’s probably not fair, because the better known Cassatt has way fewer quadri on display here. Still, McNicoll moves further in the direction of abstraction and pointillism, maybe a step closer to the avant garde, although the themes point in the direction of Victoriana. There are lavishly painted dresses, sofas, hats, gloves, furniture, gardens - but McNicoll also depicts farm work and domestic labour amidst the endless scenes of leisure.
There is so much sun in her paintings - they would probably work well as SAD therapy in November. (Very few, almost none, are of Canada - though there is one big smudge called “Ontario snow storm”.) I’ve consulted Samantha Burton’s monograph on McNicoll, and it appears that she did create a handful of darker paintings, but no more than that. Among the four McNicolls at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, one depicts an overcast day. Marketplace (1910), here below, is also in Oshawa, though not at the AGO this time.
Interior (circa 1910) gets a digitized time lapse in the exhibition: a video of the painting showing, based on the position of the sun, what the room might have looked like an hour, two hours, several hours before the painting captured the moment in time.