Mary Schäffer – adventurer, writer, painter, photographer – is captured by historian Colleen Skidmore in her book, Searching for Mary Schäffer: Women Wilderness Photography.
Part of a recent spate of books that preserve the stories of women artists, it tells how Schäffer, born into a wealthy Philadelphia family, defied convention by making four-month horseback excursions north of Banff, accompanied by a female companion and guides, in the summers of 1907 and 1908.
One of the first white women to visit the area, she painted stunning watercolours of the alpine flora and took remarkable photographs of Indigenous families. She published accounts of her travels, best exemplified by her 1911 book Old Indian Trails, a hit in North America and Britain. It was even reviewed in the New York Times, and favourably so.
Schäffer travelled widely to give public lectures and show her slides, and her work appeared in magazines in London and New York. In 1908, she visited Japan and photographed the Ainu people on Hokkaido, part of the growing genre of women’s travel writing that emerged as international transportation improved.
By 1912, Schäffer’s adventures were subsiding. One of the book’s final images is an elegant portrait of Schäffer, a dog at her feet, sitting beside a large fireplace in her Banff home, Tarry-a-while, where she lived until her death in 1937.
Skidmore’s book, published by the University of Alberta Press, is academic in tone, but engaging nonetheless. It deservedly fits Schäffer into a historical narrative mostly populated by men.
Meanwhile, another history of a Canadian artist who defied gender stereotypes – Mary Riter Hamilton – was also published this year. An early war artist, she grew up on a Manitoba homestead, and endured hardship and danger to paint the battlefields of France and Belgium in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.
No Man’s Land: The Life and Art of Mary Riter Hamilton, written by retired University of Manitoba history professor Kathryn A. Young and Sarah M. McKinnon, a former senior administrator at OCAD University in Toronto, draws on Hamilton’s letters to friends to offer new insights into her life.
Sen. Patricia Bovey, a former director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, has praised the book, published by the University of Manitoba Press, saying it provides “a valuable period history of women in wider society and the plight of women artists.”
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Also this year, a new book by Evelyn Walter, The Beaver Hall Group and Its Legacy, released by Dundurn, a Toronto publisher, follows up on Walter’s 2005 book, The Women of Beaver Hall: Canadian Modernist Painters.
Awareness of this art group – a sort of urban counterpart to the Group of Seven – has grown in recent years, thanks to a show organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group. The touring show, which was hosted a year ago at the Glenbow in Calgary, featured a catalogue of the same name. So there’s no shortage of reading on the group, which included Prudence Heward, Anne Savage, Kathleen Morris and others.
This year has also seen a number of books about contemporary artists. Places, Paths, and Pauses: Marlene Creates, published by Goose Lane Editions in collaboration with the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, both in Fredericton, is a standout for anyone interested in ecological art. The Beaverbrook’s show, which will tour nationally, is a four-decade retrospective of the Newfoundland artist’s work.
In Vancouver, Bulgarian-born Vancouver artist Pnina Granirer published her memoir, Light Within the Shadows, through Granville Island Publishing this year. And Apples, etc.: An Artist’s Memoir, by longtime Vancouver artist Gathie Falk, written with art critic Robin Laurence, is due out soon from Vancouver publisher Figure 1.