1898
Two-year-old Prudence Heward.
1925
Fontainebleau, France
Prudence Heward in the forest at Fontainebleau.
1940
Knowlton, Quebec, Canada
Prudence Heward reading.
United Kingdom
Prudence Heward, right, and her brother Chilion with an unidentified woman in England during the First World War.
(Study for Portrait of Ellen.)
Study for Portrait of Ellen.
(Study for Portrait of Barbara)
Study for Portrait of Barbara
Heward was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on July 2, 1896, into a well-to-do family. Prudence Heward was the sixth of eight children, including Dorothy, Barbara, Jim, Chilion, Honor, Rooney Heward. Prudence Heward was born to Sarah Efa Jones and Arthur R.G. Heward. Her father worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The family lived in a huge house in Montreal, spending summers at Fernbank, near Brockville, Ontario.
In childhood, Prudence Heward spent a lot of time painting alone in her studio because of her poor health. She first began taking drawing lessons at the age of twelve.
Beginning in 1912, when she was sixteen, her family experienced a series of shocking events and, as a result, she temporarily stopped painting. On May 16 her father died, and less than a week later, Prudence Heward’s sister Dorothy died in childbirth. After that, another sister, Barbara, died in October at the age of 20. The following year, Heward's brother Jim contracted tuberculosis. He recovered his health enough to enlist in the army, and in 1914 he and Heward’s other brother, Chilion, went to Europe to fight in World War I.
Prudence Heward, along with her mother and sister Honor, started to work for the Red Cross in England. During that period of time, Heward didn't produce new artworks. However, being in London benefited her art, as she attended exhibitions and learned about European modernism. The Heward family returned to Montreal in 1919, when Prudence Heward was twenty-three.
On her return, Heward enrolled at the Art Association of Montreal (AAM), studying with William Brymner and Maurice Cullen. There Heward met fellow artists Lilias Torrance Newton, Edwin Holgate, and Sarah Robertson.
In 1925, Prudence Heward took classes in Paris at the Académie Colarossi, where she studied under the direction of Charles Guérin, a French Post-Impressionist painter who had been a pupil of Gustave Moreau, one of Matisse’s teachers. Besides, she studied drawing at the École des beaux-arts under the supervision of Bernard Naudin. The artist's brief training in France influenced her art practice throughout her life.
From an early career, Heward's artworks received the attention from the press. She first received public acknowledgment in 1922 when she created a portrait of Mrs. Hope Scott in 1922, included in that year’s Spring Exhibition. Prudence Heward painted both white and black women. Although she specialized in figure painting, she also produced landscapes and still lifes and she was invited to exhibit with the Group of Seven in the early 1930s.
In 1930 Prudence Heward and her mother moved into a large house at 3467 Peel Street, where she opened a studio on the top floor. In 1930, her artworks At the Theatre (1928) and The Emigrants (1928) were part of a Group of Seven exhibition. In 1931 three of her paintings - Girl Under a Tree, Cagnes and Street in Cagnes - were included in a Group of Seven exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (today the Art Gallery of Ontario).
Through an introduction by A.Y. Jackson, Heward got acquainted with Isabel McLaughlin, who was living in Paris and with whom she developed a lifelong friendship. Heward and McLaughlin travelled together to Italy, sketching in Venice and Florence. Heward created several small oil sketches of Venetian scenes during this trip as well as during her previous trip to Europe. The artist held her first personal exhibition in 1932.
Despite the fact that Heward specialized in painting people, she was invited to exhibit with the Group of Seven multiple times in the late 1920s and early 1930s, who favoured landscape painting. In 1930, her artworks At the Theatre and The Emigrants, both created in 1928, were part of the Group of Seven exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) and at the Art Association of Montreal. In 1932 Heward had her first solo exhibition at W. Scott & Sons Gallery in Montreal. In 1941 she attended the Kingston Conference, organized by André Biéler and held at Queen’s University.
Prudence Heward was asked to join the selection committee, with Lawren Harris and Will Ogilvie, for the Canadian Group of Painters exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1933. When the gallery’s trustees worried that Nude in the Studio, 1933, by Lilias Torrance Newton (1896–1980), would be found offensive because of the nudity, Heward argued that the exhibition should be cancelled unless the work was included. Nude in the Studio was ultimately removed from the show. Despite her resistance, Heward was persuaded by her fellow artists to allow the exhibition to proceed as planned.
Asthma, from which Heward suffered throughout her life, worsened after she got in a car accident in May 1939. Prudence Heward’s nose was injured, and this affected her already poor health. Heward went to Los Angeles in 1947 with her mother and her sister Rooney trying to find treatment at the Good Samaritan Hospital, however, they didn't succeed.
Prudence Heward was an important modernist artist of the early twentieth century. Her artworks draw the attention of art historians concerned not only with Canadian art but also with issues of gender, class, and race.
In 1929 Heward won first prize for Girl on a Hill, 1928, at the Willingdon Arts Competition.
A memorial exhibition of her paintings was organized by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in 1948. The exhibition travelled to nine Canadian cities during its sixteen-month tour.
Today, her paintings can be found in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada library and archives, Ottawa, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario, among others.
Leaves
(Study for Portrait of Barbara)
Apple Tree
(Study for Portrait of Ellen.)
Rollande
Anna
September
Sarah Eliot
Autumn Hills
Farmhouse and Car
Vase of Flowers II
In Bermuda
The Farmer's Daughter
Girl on a Hill
Girl in Yellow Sweater
Fruit in the Grass
Portrait of Mrs. Zimmerman
Autumn Fields, Knowlton
Autumn Landscape
Mulleins and Rocks
Ann
Back Garden
Fields
Farm
Landscape
Vase of Flowers I
Landscape
Grain Elevator, Prescott
In Devonshire
From the Studio
Portrait of Randolph Stanley Hewton
Lake Wonish, Quebec
My Housekeeper's Daughter
The drawing room of the artist
Farm scene, Brockville
White Fish Falls, Georgian Bay
Farm in winter
Quotations: "I think that of all the arts in Canada painting shows more vitality and has a stronger Canadian feeling... there is more interest shown in figure painting than previously and I hope we shall develop something interesting and Canadian in feeling, yet universal, modern, yet timeless."
Prudence Heward was an active member of modern and avant-garde artists' groups throughout the 1930s. The painter joined the executive committee of The Atelier: A School of Drawing Painting Sculpture in 1931, which was founded by artist John Lyman.
Heward was a co-founder of the Canadian Group of Painters, becoming its vice president between 1933 and 1939. She became a founding member of the Contemporary Arts Society in 1939. She was connected with the society until 1944.
Contrary to popular belief, Prudence Heward was not an official member of Montreal’s Beaver Hall Group, which actually had no official mandate or manifesto. However, she was closely affiliated with the group, befriending many of the members and exhibiting with them on several shows.
Physical Characteristics: Prudence Heward had poor health since childhood. The artist suffered from asthma her whole life. The frequent attacks forced Heward to cease painting for various periods of time. She often wrote to her friend Isabel McLaughlin, who was also a painter, describing in her letters how these interruptions were both frustrating and discouraging. In a letter from May 17, 1935, she wrote: "I was in bed for a week with hay fever. I’m just beginning to feel myself again; how these attacks keep pulling me back and down, no one knows how much."
Quotes from others about the person
Anne Savage: "Not since the days of J.W. Morrice has any native Montréaler brought such distinction to her native city, and never before has such a contribution been made by a woman."
A.Y. Jackson: "She did not find it easy to paint... Her usual procedure was to use one of her landscape sketches as a background for a figure piece. She liked working on large canvases and she would struggle with many misgivings for fullness of form and bold contrasts of colour."
Arthur Lismer: "[Heward's] landscapes avoid anything in the way of pretty textures or pictorial detail. They are concerned more with the structure and movement of the earth and tree forms than with the likeness of the scene."
Robert Ayre: "Never content with mere surface impressions Miss Heward is a painter of profound integrity, a painter who both stimulates and satisfies."
Prudence Heward never married. She lived together with her mother until the artist's death in 1947. Nevertheless, her life was full of intimate friendships, such as the one she shared with Isabel McLaughlin.
Isabel Grace McLaughlin (1903-2002) was a Canadian artist, art patron and philanthropist. She was an early Modernist Canadian painter specializing in landscapes and still life.
