History

Montreal's Beaver Hall Group is often thought of as an all-female group of painters. It did have a high proportion of women when it was formed in 1920 and the artists who stuck together long after the group disbanded were all women, but the original members and exhibitors included many men. Amongst them were some well-known names such as Edwin Holgate, Robert Pilot and A.Y. Jackson (the founding President.)  

What brought the artists together was probably the simple practical need to find a venue for exhibiting and selling their works. What resulted, though, was a studio and meeting place which fostered long-lasting professional friendships which would have a beneficial effect for decades to come.  

The four artists who started the group were all former students of William Brymner. They were; Mabel May, Lilias Newton, Randolph Hewton and Edwin Holgate. They set about looking for a studio and exhibition space to rent and found 305 Beaver Hall Hill, an old house just down from Dorchester Street (now René Levesque) which backed onto the gardens of St. Patrick's Church.  

The three-storey house had room for studios upstairs and a large exhibition room downstairs. It was, in theory, the ideal starting place for a group of artists looking to break away from the constraints of the vetted, institutional exhibitions with their tendency to favour 'traditional' art over 'modern' art. 

Rather like the Group of Seven, members of the Beaver Hall Group were trying to establish a new, truly Canadian, way of painting. Apart from the high proportion of women artists, one thing that distinguished the Beaver Hall Group from their counterparts, the Group of Seven, was their broader subject matter. For this group, art was not just about landscapes. Portraiture and figure studies, including nudes, had equal importance. 

The first exhibition was held in January 1921. Unfortunately, the Beaver Hall Group only managed three more exhibitions before they disbanded two years later. According to Edwin Holgate this was because of financial constraints. They probably could no longer afford the rent. The Group of Seven in Toronto had no such problems; Lawren Harris had used a small part of his inherited fortune to build a special studio for his artist friends in 1914.  

Undeterred, six of the women continued to paint together, working from their own studios. With the addition of three more female artists, making a final group of nine women, they continued to draw inspiration from each other for a further two decades. Two excellent books describing the history of these 'Women of Beaver Hall' can be found on our Links page. 

Click here for a brief history of the street named Beaver Hall Hill.